Furies

PROLOGUE: THE PAST

The rising sun spilled its light over the northern ridges of the Ozarks, painting deep shadows on the backsides of hills and the depths of ravines. Light came even more slowly to a particularly deep gully; the sunken recess of rock remained shrouded in darkness well after the sun pulled itself off the horizon. The false night played games with the time-sense of the young man who slept, hidden in a pile of age-worn boulders, underneath that culvert; several times, he cast a sleepy eye around his still-dark surroundings, and with frustrated sighs, tried to get back to sleep.

When a stray glance upward revealed the rapidly-richening blue of the sky above him, the young man uttered a vicious curse and pulled himself to his feet. His legs shook from exhaustion, but he forced them to straighten. Another look up at the sky brought another, more fervent curse; with renewed energy, the young man kicked out the remains of last night’s fire and turned to wake up his companion.

"Hey, hey Bud... We gotta get goin’... Bud..?"

His voice trailed off as he realized Bud no longer slept next to him- or, he realized as he looked around, anywhere near him at all. The lone horse that stood tethered nearby, an unremarkable chestnut, gazed calmly at the young man and whickered for food. Other than the horse and a lizard which darted over a small rock, only the young man moved and breathed in the depths of the gully.

And Bud had been gone three weeks. When would he get used to not seeing his friend, or even used to the idea that Bud was never coming back? The young man hoped it would be soon, hoped it would coincide with the death of Jacob Sulla. Yet even as he wished it so, a steely certainty replaced hope.

Jacob Sulla would die.

No room for argument there.

The young man broke camp, shaking out his thin bedroll and tacking up the horse as it ate. Once he finished clearing the fire, the young man swung astride and searched for the way out of his hiding place The creature protested as a pair of rowelled spurs dug into its sides and urged him up the narrow draw that led up from the gully. A tangle-limbed bush reached out to ensnare the protruding butt of the young man’s rifle; an incoherent growl rose in his throat and he tore the rifle free.

With a final surge of powerful hindquarters, the horse broke out of the gully, sides heaving as it strained to catch its breath. The young man looked around, searching the landscape for the signs of the trail he’d followed until night and his own exhaustion had forced him to stop. He found it- not much more than a broken branch and two missed hoofprints, but it meant Sulla still kept his northeastward track, heading for central Missouri. The young man set his horse to a steady jog, eyes to the ground, heading the same way and trying not to let the past consume him.

"Hey, Vin, you want to head over to the saloon for a bit?" Bud asked as he untacked his horse, his large, rough hands moving competently over his gear, pausing only to calm the horse as it shifted in response to a crack of thunder that shook the walls of the Coleville livery. "Might help if we looked around and asked some questions- I feel pretty sure ol’ Sully-boy’s going to want to be inside tonight."

"You mean you’re wantin’ t’ get somethin’ t’ drink," Vin returned with a derisive snort; the lopsided grin he offered his friend- "mentor", Bud said; as a College Graduate, Bud knew all sorts of fancy words but never got smartassed about it- took away the insult’s sting. "We been drinkin’ that stuff ever since we got outta that last town. Figure you’d want to drink somethin’ normal... like whiskey ‘r beer ‘r somethin’."

"As a temperate man, Vin, and a simple one, I feel water’s best after a long day’s tracking- and during it, for that matter. We’re pretty close," Bud said, and the sudden shading of his voice from lecturing to serious gave the younger man pause; Bud’s ‘feelings’ almost always proved accurate. He knew, somehow, when they’d gotten close to a target, and spent much of his time trying to develop that same gut-voice in his protege.

"It’ll come to you soon enough," Bud always assured him, whenever Vin got frustrated. "It doesn’t take near the amount of brains to hunt a buffalo as it does a man, and the man is the far more dangerous of the two. Lots of times, it comes down to the man with the better mind, the better instincts, than the man with the better gun."

Vin wondered if maybe his own gut-voice was speaking up for the first time, in something other than its usual hungry growl. He felt on edge, and something coiled in him, as if in waiting. The air throbbed with tense anticipation along with the thunder and lightning, and the rain that had begun to pour outside.

"Furthermore," Bud continued, to break the taut silence, "I wonder what led you to believe I wanted to go to the saloon for a drink. We’ve been on the trail for a month, and you’re starting to look more attractive by the day." He dumped his saddle a corner and draped his bedroll over it, then straightened to run his eyes salaciously up and down Vin’s body, rubbing the stubble of his chin between thumb and forefinger.

"Can’t help it, Bud," Vin sighed with mock regret, shifting his lanky form in a pathetic parody of a working girl’s seductive sway, his grin spreading slowly as he warmed to the game and added, "but ya probably can’t afford me."

"After we bring Sulla in, Tanner, we could buy yonder brothel," Bud assured him as he picked up Vin’s gear and stored it next to his. "One thousand bucks... not bad for a guy who saw fit to murder three families in a wagon train... Too bad we didn’t catch those other two, yet c’est la vie... But for now, I think I’ll settle for that water and a pair of warm, feminine arms. Ready?"

"Hell, yeah," Vin said as he straightened his new hide coat around him, liking the way it felt across his shoulders, the rough tooling of the leather of the collar. Bud scowled as he brushed past Tanner and strode out into the rain.

"Can’t believe you won that off me!" he shouted over the downpour. Vin hustled to catch up, shoulders hunched against the rain; he barely caught Bud’s remark, the rain came down so hard, like a cold whiplash across his body. Buckets of it, illuminated only by the occasional streaks of lightning across the sky, soaked Vin in seconds.

"Hey, I told ya your sight was off, old man," Vin retorted, voice edged with disdain, "Tried t’ be helpful, but you wasn’t believin’ me- either that, or you’re so blind by now it didn’t make much diff’rence whether your sight was off or not. Coulda beat ya at a hundred feet, William Carlisle O’Shea-Florinton, Junior."

"Shit, you used to be quieter than a churchmouse," Bud commented, wincing at the sound of his much-hated formal name. "Now look at you, one of the mouthiest sons a’ bitches I know. Whatever happened to respecting your elders?"

"When you can outshoot ‘em at a quarter mile, guess your elders don’t get much respectin’."

"This is a thankless task," sighed Bud, turning his eyes up to Heaven and touching the small iron cross that hung around his neck. "Merciful Lord, I teach a boy everything I know about how to hunt a man instead of a dumb animal and what do I get? A backhanded ‘thank you,’ insults up the wazoo, and my jacket right off my back- that’s exactly what I get. Remind me to kill you before too long, Tanner. You’re getting on my nerves."

Vin opened his mouth to say sure, but the sharp report of a single gunshot broke through the chaos of the night. Blood bloomed on Bud’s chest, unnaturally bright and glaring to Vin, who stood frozen for a moment before instinctively darting for cover. He found it behind a rain barrel and not a moment too soon; four more shots peppered the ground around him, one going right over his head.

While he hid and cursed his impotence, fumbling for his sawed-off with his now-graceless fingers slipping over the wet stock of the weapon, Bud lay in the rain. The thick crimson ooze had stopped almost immediately as the heart ceased to beat and, now diluted, flowed a pale pink down the bounty hunter’s side and into the water that pooled on the muddy street.
Through the wind and rain and the rising roar of his own grief and fury, Vin heard Jacob Sulla laugh.

Vin shook his head, forcing his mind from his memories and back to concentrating on the trail in front of him. The sign read true; Sulla had struck a path straight toward St. Louis, no doubt of it- aside from farmsteads and the occasional shantytown, nothing lay between the eastern edge of the Ozarks and that city.

Suspicions and implications worked their ways through Vin’s brain, and he sorted through them just as Bud had taught him. A trap might wait for him not much farther along; Sulla had to know he had half the bounty hunters in the West after him, especially... especially after that night in Coleville. He might even know that Vin Tanner was one of them, a man made formidable by both skill and revenge. If he meant to keep riding on, though, St. Louis made a logical place to lay low for a while and then head off somewhere else along the innumerable highways and trails that went in and out of the city.

Those thoughts had him so wrapped up he almost rode right past the campsite. Vin saw the unmistakable contours of a horse’s saddle-clad back through the screen of low-slung branches, and the faint flickering of a dying campfire silhouetted the horse’s legs. As casually as he could, Vin continued for a short distance past, eyeing the surrounding forest for possible ambush. He saw nothing, but did not relax his vigilance, just unholstered his rifle after dismounting and, keeping low, made his way to the edge of the screen.

Jacob Sulla sat there, his gaunt body hunched over the fire and nursing a cup of coffee, oblivious to everything. Brown hair, still mussed by sleep, stood on end in places and clumped together in others. Eyes just as brown stared listlessly into the flames. The man looked dirt-tired, vulnerable, and very much alone.

Strange, for a man who rode with two others just as ruthless as himself, but Tolliver and Fairman had gotten caught after the wagon train murders by some marshals and got packed off to Yuma.

Good.

Vin felt the rifle burn in his hand, a steady and demanding pulse that worked its way up his arm. He could shoot the man right now, a clean bullet through the head. He could shoot Jacob Sulla, but it struck Vin as a kindness, to have Bud’s murderer put down like a spavined horse. A great kindness, Vin thought bitterly, for a man who deserved as much kindness as he’d seen a Kiowa brave give to a cavalry officer he’d caught trying to have his way with a fellow brave’s wife.

Maybe less, for that matter. Vin pulled his revolver, a silent sliding of metal against leather, and aimed it. Sulla didn’t look up, didn’t do anything until one bullet pierced his leg right below his knee, tearing muscle and shattering bone. Sulla shrieked in agony, toppling over and reflexively reaching for his knee to stop the sudden and horrendous flow of blood. His hands never made it- the cold click of a pulled-back hammer froze him in place, curled up fetally, pain-glazed brown eyes staring upward at the young man who stared calmly down at him.

Tanner knelt, keeping the Colt trained on the prone man and reaching for his Bowie knife with deceptive calm. He pulled the blade from its sheath, glad that he had sharpened it only the night before, and reholstered the gun- a deep insult for any man familiar to the code of weapons, a silent statement that the victor did not consider the loser to be of any consequence or danger. Sulla’s eyes bulged as he saw the knife and the naked ferocity in Tanner’s eyes, and he started to babble.

"Please... oh, God, please Mister, you got the... you got the wrong man," Sulla stammered, his words falling over themselves, "you’ve got the wrong man, I swear to God! Please... please, Christ! I’m Isaac Sulla... I’m Jacob’s twin brother... he’s gone back to Kentucky, I tell ya! God! Oh, God, help me... help me..."

"Awful convenient to have a twin brother, don’t it Jake? Me, I got me a twin brother too... he’s King a’ England," Vin murmured, his voice cold silk over iron. "Way I see it, we got two ways a’ doin’ this... either you ‘fess up an’ I take you in t’ be hung, or the other way, which’ll make you wish I handed you your rope myself. Your choice." The sun that filtered through the trees played along the length of the knife.

"I’m Isaac Sulla, mister! Please, oh sweet God, please..." The man stared up at him, brown eyes alight with wordless pleading. The fine-boned, vulpine features paled as Sulla realized sweet God had very little to do in the way of helping him.

One carefully placed slash across the bullet wound produced a bone-jarring scream of pain from Sulla’s lips. Vin gazed down at the wide-eyed, quaking man who had managed finally to strangle the cry through gritted teeth and channel it into a series of whistling gasps for air. A dispassionate smile creased Tanner’s face, a smile nothing like the one he had offered Bud that night three weeks back, and he methodically ran his index finger along the bloodied edge of the blade. He studied his finger, the blood that coated it, and gently brushed it across the man’s forehead, leaving a bright red smear; the man tried to shrink away, but could not.

"Guess it’ll be the other way then."

The morning spent itself into early afternoon. When the sun dipped past its zenith, two horses and one rider emerged from the forest; one horse had an awkward bundle slung over its back, its cloth wrapping bloody and torn in places. Behind them, the trees echoed with nearly incoherent cries, cries that had built upon cries until their maker finally died. They rang, still, reluctant to dispel in the heavy air.
 

"Wrong man... wrong man... oh, please God, wrong man..."

CHAPTER ONE

The sun battered down on them, merciless in its intensity. Each of the three riders kept their horses to a sedate walk, unwilling to tax the animals in such heat and unwilling to do the same thing to themselves. One rider, usually clad all in black, had forsaken his long duster, which he had draped across the back of his saddle; the two men with him had done the same thing, and their coats flapped slightly in the fitful breeze that felt like it had come straight out of an oven and did little in the way of cooling anything.

Heat also imposed silence, and none of the three had spoken a word since leaving Eagle Bend earlier that morning. So when the black-clad man turned to address the rider with the dark moustache, his words were the first spoken in hours.

"Hey, Buck?" Chris glanced at his friend who rode next to him.

"Yeah, Chris?" Buck turned in his saddle to regard the black-clad gunslinger curiously, and Chris guess that Buck had to be wondering what had come over him, to voluntarily break the silence. In their twelve years of friendship, Buck had always taken it upon himself to start the conversation, or revive it- if it had died its predictable death at Chris Larabee’s hands.

Chris kept his voice calm, nonchalant, casting quick looks around the area from underneath his hatbrim. "How fast you think that horse a’ yours can run?" he asked, waving a casually dismissive hand at Buck’s grey.

"Well, when he ain’t drugged up on laudanum, pretty damn quick. Why?"

"You mind gettin’ your ass back to town?" Chris inquired, dropping his voice a little as he reached for his sidearm. "We got-"

A crack, a flash of pain just in the curve of where Chris’s neck met his shoulder.

Nothing.

"Wake up, dearest."

The voice penetrated through thick swathes of sleep, soft and persuasive. A dark, violent dream gripped the man who hung spread-eagled on the wall, wrists and ankles encased by iron shackles. The man fought to wake, fought the grasp of the nightmare of blood and flame, and finally won.

Chris opened one eye and, wincing at the blinding light, promptly closed it again. The words came from nowhere, from no source Chris could determine as if the air alone had spoken them. Of course, Larabee reflected, it could be a product of the fever that gripped him, a searing heat that radiated off his body.

"Come now, Christopher. Wake up for me." A gentle finger traced a path down Chris’s cheekbone, right along a deep gash formed by a blunt knife that had had just enough edge to cut.

Chris first throttled back the scream that clogged his throat, but his eyes flew open reflexively and the new pain of light searing him sent that scream exploding from his lips.

After agony spent itself, leaving Chris limp and trembling in his shackles, he managed to raise his head and look around his prison through slitted eyes.

Candles crammed almost every available space in the small room, their heat and light magnified by mirrors, which took up most of the rest. So it wasn’t fever, Chris thought dully, just a whole fuckin’ lot of candles and mirrors. The thought didn’t help; all sweat must have long ago boiled out of him, and the heat weighed oppressively down on his mind and body. No windows, he realized, just a door on the far side of the room with a narrow path between candles and mirrors that led to it.

"You awake now, Christopher?" asked the voice again. Chris looked from side to side, saw no one in the room with him. Panic fought to rise in him, but he forced it back.

"Who... who... in the hell..." he rasped.

"No questions now," the voice whispered, smooth and soothing. "At least, none from you. Let’s return to my questions, though. I have so many of them, you know. Everyone knows so much about you, Chris Larabee, but strangely, they know almost nothing. I’m one of those people, and I’m pretty curious... what was it like, seeing their bodies for the first time? How’d you get them back to Indiana? What did her father think?"

Chris saw fire that did not come from the candles in the room. It came instead from a small house in a valley, blazing brightly as flames wrapped themselves lovingly around timbers and tar-paper, the fire crackling with malicious glee as it feasted on the porch furniture and the bodies of the woman and child inside...

The heat rose immeasurably, the candles flickering with all the maliciousness of hell, and under the influence of the words that stoked his delirium, Chris plunged once more into nightmare.

Nathan Jackson leaned back in his chair, grateful to be relaxing for the first time in days. With Chris, Buck, and Josiah gone off to Eagle Bend on an errand for the judge, keeping an eye on the town and mending its sick or injured had him exhausted. Even with the bad news contained in the most recent communications from the judge, and the perpetual tenseness of the man next to him, Nathan felt himself sinking downward.

He had come here for a purpose other than relaxation though, and to that end, turned to question the man next to him.

"Vin?"

No response.

"Hey, Vin?" Nathan followed up the summons with a firm shake of the tracker’s shoulder. Tanner started violently at the contact, lurching in his seat and whirling around to face Nathan. Just as startled himself, Jackson almost fell over in his own chair; wide blue eyes met equally wide brown ones and at length, both relaxed. Vin slouched down in his chair once more and exhaled a shaky breath.

"Damn, Nathan," he breathed, "you’re gonna be havin’ one of us pull a bullet outta you one of these days if’n ya keep that up."

"You were dead to the world," Nathan said defensively. "Was askin’ if you recognized any of the men over yonder, playin’ poker with Ezra? Figure with the jailbreak outta Yuma, you might know..."

Vin’s mouth twisted in a rare display of disdain, a disdain that echoed in Nathan; they’d gotten word down from Judge Travis warning them that two men had escaped from Yuma two weeks ago. Travis had accordingly sent two old WANTED posters in the mail along with details not included in his telegram.

"Right over the goddamn wall," muttered Vin, reaching out to pick up his mug of beer, his eyes giving Ezra’s table the once-over from over the rim of the glass. "Guards must have bricks in fronta their eyes. You don’t fuckin’ let men like George Fairman and Alec Tolliver just go over the goddamn wall." He set the mug down with a decisive ‘thud’ on the tabletop, without taking a drink, and added, "Nope, don’t see ‘em."

"Ain’t heard of anythin’ between then and now," Nathan pointed out, taking a sip of his own beer. "’Least, not anythin’ that has witnesses identifyin’ either Fairman or Tolliver. Maybe they’re lyin’ low for a bit."

"Maybe they’re dead," Vin returned expressionlessly, not meeting Nathan’s eyes. Nathan tried to scrutinize the sharpshooter without seeming obvious about it, but sensed Tanner knew very well that Jackson studied him. The healer tried to put a name to what he heard in Vin’s voice- flat, cold, and utterly without concern, with a lack of affect that almost bordered on sounding satisfied.

J.D. effectively derailed Nathan’s train of thought, bursting through the doors of the saloon, brandishing two pieces of time-yellowed paper and carrying a stack of new ones under one arm. Seeing his friends, Dunne made a beeline over to their table in the corner, hooked a chair with with his heel, pulled it over to him and sat down.

Vin regarded the younger man with the same clinical coolness that had Nathan on edge; J.D. saw this and his boisterous spirits flattened under the tracker’s level, appraising study.

"You got somethin’ there?" Nathan asked, to bring them past a moment that had rapidly become to awkward for him to deal with.

"Got the new WANTED posters in for Fairman and Tolliver," J.D. said, handing the parchments to Nathan, who took and examined them for a moment before passing them on to Vin, who merely glanced at the sheaf of paper and tossed it on the table. Hesitantly, J.D. reached across the expanse of wood that separated him from the tracker and picked the posters up again. "Was going to tack some up around town," he added after another long moment.

"Sounds good, J.D.," Nathan told the young sheriff, who offered him a slight smile of thanks. Jackson turned to Vin and seeing that the tracker’s attention had lapsed, resisted the urge to jab Tanner in the side as he asked, "Don’t that sound good to you, Vin?"

"Uh-huh," grunted Vin, not meeting either Nathan’s or J.D.’s eyes. "You could do that," he continued, now fixing J.D. with a blank look, "but a bunch a’ paper ain’t gonna keep the likes of Tolliver or Fairman away. Men who kill people in a wagon train ain’t gonna shy away from some posters, no matter if’n you tar-paper the town with ‘em."

"Right, Vin," J.D. began, trying to defend himself, "but maybe it’ll help a little anyway. They’re wanted for killin’ three prison guards too, an’ there’s a good-sized bounty on ‘em. If they were smart, they’d crawl out into the desert an’ stay there for ten years."

"Boy’s just doin’ his job," Nathan interjected after J.D. finished, glaring at the tracker, who ignored him.

"I know about Fairman an’ Tolliver," Vin said shortly, turning to J.D. "I chased them n’ Jacob Sulla--"

"You brought in Kansas Jake Sulla?" J.D. half-squeaked in surprise. He wished he could have kept the display down a bit, maybe try for the nonchalance that he saw in Chris and Vin, but Jacob Sulla? A glance over at Nathan showed similar shock, and J.D. felt a little better. Still... Jacob Sulla?

"Yeah, Jake Sulla," Vin affirmed, his voice frozen and devoid of pride. "Those two rode with him n’ Quantrill a ways back, an’ after the war, they started on robbin’ wagon trains headin’ out from St. Louis. One day they attacked a train headin’ for Kansas, killed three families. Turned out t’ be the wrong wagon train to hit- Marshals caught Tolliver n’ Fairman the followin’ day, I caught Sulla a month after."

"Jeez, Vin," exhaled J.D., a little more than bewildered at the unexpected revelation- Vin almost never shared anything regarding his past life, and when he did, he volunteered the information only. J.D. didn’t know much about Kiowas and Comanches, but Vin had once told him a couple things about them that made J.D.’s skin crawl, and he figured that even the worst torture the Kiowas or Comanches could inflict wouldn’t drag any information out of Tanner, either, the man was that stubborn.

Tanner shrugged noncomittally. "A thousand bucks had half the territory after Sulla. I just got to him first." With that, he stood and made his way out of the saloon, ghosting through the shadows. J.D. got up in pursuit, but Buck rose to his feet and laid a restraining hand on the young man’s arm, shaking his head in silent negation of J.D.’s purpose.

"He don’t want to talk about it no more, J.D.," Nathan said finally, removing his hand as J.D. paused in a ridiculous half-standing, half-sitting crouch. "Go on an’ tack up them posters- I think it’d be best if we all gave Vin some space, ‘least until Chris n’ Josiah get back. We’ll sort it out then."

J.D. nodded his agreement and picked up the posters before leaving the saloon, trying not to think about the horrible, awkward conversation that had just taken place. He went about his work, heading off to the outside of town; he figured he’d start there and work his way in, so he’d end up at the boarding-house in time to catch some sleep before he took his turn at watch.

Nodding with satisfaction, having managed to banish Vin from his mind, J.D. strode down the boardwalk to the livery, unaware of the shadow that followed him in close pursuit.

CHAPTER TWO

Chris toppled onto his horse’s neck, catapulted there by the terrific impact of bullet against flesh. Startled, his mount reared and twisted to the side, sending the gunslinger flying off its back and into the dirt. Larabee bounced once, twice, and rolled over to crash against a boulder by the side of the path.

Josiah yanked his horse to a sliding stop, trying not to run over Chris’s prone body. A sharp spur to the horse’s right side sent it skittering over to the left and Josiah tried to keep moving, to keep out of the sights of whoever had shot Chris, as he fumbled at his side for his gun, cursing as his fingers tangled in the holster. He finally got the revolver free and pulled back the hammer, ready to fire, his eyes scanning the landscape for any target.

In the distance, he saw the dwindling dust cloud kicked up by Buck’s horse. He couldn’t tell what shape Wilmington was in, and he sent a quick prayer to Heaven that the gunfighter would be okay.

His last thought, before an agony of fire lanced up his right side, was a hope- a hope that Buck would be okay, because he sure as hell wasn’t.

"Josiah, do wake up and open those lovely eyes of yours."

The man chained on the cold floor didn’t move or acknowledge the soft-spoken request. He heard it but knew the pointlessness of opening his eyes, for an unbroken darkness awaited him, a general blackness which made the private night-time of his closed eyelids seem bright by comparison. Josiah Sanchez had never claimed the dark among his fears, yet this darkness pressed against his eyes and frightened him.

"You really must open your eyes, Josiah," the voice coaxed once more. "How can you see me with your eyes closed?"

Reluctantly, Josiah opened his eyes.

Blackness again.

He closed them once more, resigned to it.

A snarl broke from his throat, raspy from dryness; Josiah realized dimly that he hadn’t had a drink since he and Chris had left Eagle Bend together. How long ago had that happened? Nothing more than hazy images came to him of the sun just past mid-afternoon, dust rising from the ground around them as wind kicked it up. Had the wind stirred up that dust, or the hooves of horses? Josiah couldn’t say.

"Where... where am I?" he managed to ask.

Mocking laughter- male laughter, Josiah thought- greeted the question. "Might call it your own personal hell, Josiah. Or wait... was that Vista City? Maybe Vista’s just your purgatory, and it’s her hell."

No doubting who the voice talked about; fury rose in Josiah and he fought against his restraints. The sharp stabbing of spikes into his wrists and ankles halted his struggles to the sounds of his own cry of pain and the laughter of that unseen man.

"Got me a friend who does those," the voice said mildly. Josiah tried, through the blood-red haze of pain, to identify the location the voice came from, but could not; it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, disembodied and menacing like the spirits he’d learned of in his studies. "Got me a friend who does those," repeated the voice, "you might know him as Alec Tolliver."

"Tolliver?" Surprise made a strange flicker through the pain. "He’s in... he’s in Yuma..."

"Not any more," the voice said, the tone assuaging all doubts Josiah may have entertained.

"Brilliant man, ain’t he, Josiah? You might want to not move from now on... those lil’ devils are powerful sharp." As the speech wore on, a heavy Kentucky accent drowned out the patronizing, refined tone. "Yup, Alec took some of your standard-issue Yuma shackles an’ welded plow teeth to ‘em. Just like nails, ain’t they?"

Josiah didn’t reply, so the voice kept on:

"Hm... just like nails, yup yup. Sharp, just like them razors your sister stole from you, tryin’ to cut her wrists. Remember that day, Josiah? Comin’ home from church, thinkin’ maybe you’d pray with her for a spell- or maybe for her, ‘cause she wasn’t taking any prayers from anyone, much less you- and you find the poor girl in your room. Wash basin full a’ blood, razors all over the floor... Poor stupid girl ended up makin’ a big mess an’ didn’t die, for all her troubles."

"How... how do you know about this?" gasped Josiah, trying not to remember that day. That day...

"For God’s sake, boy, she has to go!" insisted the older man, slamming shut his copy of Fordyce’s Sermons, unheeding of the ink bottle that fell to the floor, spilling its inky contents over the carpeting.

"Don’t say anything more about it!" Josiah shouted, whirling around, one mighty arm sweeping books and china off a low shelf. His father jumped but regained his habitual icy calmness. The two men stared at each other, both equally enraged although the father did not show it. Fury painted itself across the younger man’s features though, the pale blue eyes fairly snapping with emotion. "She’s not going anywhere," Josiah said in a calmer voice, with deadly restraint. "An’ she’s definitely not going to some mission where Uncle Isaiah can lock her up in a dormitory."

"She’ll stay at the mission with your Uncle Isaiah," Josiah’s father said in cool, measured tones. "It’s the best place for her, demonic whore that she is."

"The hell she will! I’m takin’ her with me."

"Do it then," Josiah’s father snarled. "I wash my hands of her."

Vin stalked out of the saloon, glad to be away from both Nathan and J.D. He felt a little guilty about near-exploding on J.D. like that, but any guilt soon swallowed itself up in thoughts of Tolliver and Fairman. Part of him wished he’d gotten there first, four years ago, made sure the ‘dead’ part of ‘dead or alive’ had gotten carried out, instead of the Marshals finding the two of them and taking them to Yuma. That part had snapped and snarled at J.D., wanting desperately to ride out and find the two criminals but finding itself restrained by responsibility, could only growl in agitation.

Maybe he’d ride out anyway, and damn what Chris would say about him abandoning the town, not to mention J.D., Nathan, and Ezra.

Except he’d made something of a promise to Judge Travis and this town...

Well, he’d be protecting the town by hunting down Tolliver and Fairman, right?

Of course he would; he would shoulder all the effort and risk, he would capture both men before they could harm any of Four Corner’s citizens, if they did indeed decide to head in the town’s direction. Vin had listened carefully to rumors in the saloon for the past week, and eavesdropped on conversations between travelers in the livery. Several stories had Tolliver and Fairman headed in the general direction of Four Corners, but they could just as easily have gone to Eagle Bend or any of the other towns.

Vin’s gut said different, and said so loudly.

Tolliver and Fairman didn’t know him, though. They might know of Jacob Sulla’s death; by all accounts the three men had been friends of sorts. Maybe they knew who had killed Sulla and turned over his body to authorities. Maybe. That had happened years ago, when they still spent their time picking up rocks at Yuma.

God, he just wanted to ride out and look for them. The desire tore at him something fierce, and he wondered how this had become so important to him; dozens of bounties and WANTED posters came across J.D.’s desk- most of them, he never looked at twice, unless the pictures belonged to men he knew, or men who posed a threat to the town. Ever since hearing about Tolliver and Fairman, though, he’d spent much of his time fighting the increasing desire to just leave. Why?

Vin didn’t have an answer.

He’d also spent much of his time thinking about Bud, how the two of them had been so gung-ho to find Tolliver and Fairman, how disappointed they’d been when Marshals brought them in, how ecstatic Bud had gotten when he brought a new WANTED poster out from the sheriff’s office one night and pointed out the ‘$1,000- DEAD OR ALIVE’ underneath Jacob Sulla’s picture.
Maybe things hit too close to home, brought back too many memories Vin had spent much of his time trying to forget, memories of another time and so many other places that seemed ages ago, worlds away from the life he led. Bud would say something like that, probably; he said something like it every time the topic of his old life, and Vin’s, had come up.

"War does things, Vin," Bud said, thoughtfully polishing the stock of his rifle for the tenth time that night; found it soothing, Bud said, for when ‘things started catching up with me’. "I tried, God knows I tried, to go back to school and start a normal life, but just couldn’t do it any more. School seemed... hell, it didn’t seem, it was. It was stupid and pointless. Seein’ men die... my men... Couldn’t go back to books after that. Couldn’t go back home and tell my family that, so I came out West."

"What’d you go t’ school for?" Vin found the concept of College vaguely fascinating in a distant sort of way, but the thought of spending years of his life behind an assortment of walls having people yammering away at him repelled him a little."Philosophy and Logic," the older man said, pausing in his cleaning to scrub his hand through thick brown hair.

"Was going to become a professor, but like I said, war does things... There’s a different logic in warfare, Vin, the logic of survival. Maybe it’s the ultimate logic, but it made the most sense to me, after I got home. Still makes the most sense now, for that matter." He saw Vin’s questioning look and added: "Them or us, Vin. One is going to die first... we’ve got to do all we can to make sure we go second."

It made sense to Vin, and he accepted it without argument.

Bud had always done that, Vin reflected, and he’d shown his younger friend how to do the same- how to ask the right people the right questions at the right time, how to sit and listen to an escaped convict playing cards without being obvious about it, how to think like a man cunning enough to kill five people in broad daylight and beat him to his next destination.

Useful things, those, and they’d stood him in good stead. Vin wondered what Bud would think about him cooling his heels in Four Corners, wondered what Bud would’ve thought about Tascosa, wondered if maybe Bud would have outsmarted Eli Joe from the get-go.

Vin reached his wagon and, pulling his coat off, flung it inside to join the mess that constituted his small piece of home; the weather had finally gotten far too hot for it, and Vin felt half-suffocated under the weight of leather. Heat gripped the town mercilessly, not unusual for late spring, but disturbing nonetheless when it didn’t even relinquish its grasp with the approach of evening. Nearby, horses stood listlessly in the corral, heads down and tails not even bothering to switch off flies and the hostler moved about his chores without conviction.

Sighing, Vin found a full canteen nestled between a spare pair of pants and a missing set of cartridges- he’d been looking for both for a while now. Bud would disapprove of... of what had he called it? "Slovenly behavior", Vin thought after a moment of racking his memory. Strong shades of Ezra in that, Tanner thought as he pulled himself up onto the driver’s seat. He settled himself, pulling the stopper out of the canteen and taking a deep draught, frowned at the lukewarm, leathery taste of the water.

He heard the sharp report of hoofbeats behind him; twisting around, Vin saw two riders and horses tearing toward him and then flying past almost in the same second, both riders’ hats pulled low against the blinding light of the setting sun that lay directly before them. Irritation surged through him- damn fools riding like to break a leg or make their horses drop dead from the heat.

"Slow the fuck down!" he shouted at the top of his lungs.

"VIN!" screamed one of the riders.

J.D.?

CHAPTER THREE

"J.D.? Wake up, young man."

"Huh? Wha-?" J.D. coughed and licked his lips, wincing as he tasted the coppery tang of blood. A cautious hand swiped across his mouth and came away wet from a split lip; he opened first one eye and then the other, desperately wishing that the black and silver spots that danced across his vision would quit so he could see his surroundings a bit better. An experimental headshake proved a bad idea, and J.D. had to grit his teeth against the arrows of pain that shot over his skull and down his back. The spots returned, worse than before, and J.D. shut his eyes again.

"Oh, God," he gasped, praying that he wouldn’t be sick.

"God don’t have much to do with this, young Mr. Dunne," the strange voice said. "You might want to save your breath for somethin’ else. Screaming, maybe."

Slowly, slowly, the words penetrated the cotton surrounding J.D.’s brain. Screaming? Panic skittered through him, and he fought to maintain control. Stay calm, he instructed himself as sternly as he could manage. Stay calm.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"First person to ask me that," the voice remarked; J.D. heard a trace of an accent- Kentucky, maybe. "But I’m really no one you know. Well, maybe ya know me by reputation, maybe ya don’t. But who I am ain’t really the important thing now. The important thing is how you feel about what you did to poor Ma Hansen."

"How... how do you know about that?" J.D. managed to ask, forcing the words through a throat slammed shut by fear. He’d tried desperately to forget about her, about the stench in her kitchen, the lamps, the fire that burned her house down around her.

And just when he thought he could manage it, when her seamed old face didn’t haunt his dreams as badly as they had, this voice pulled her ghost up from the burnt ruins of her house.

"Oh, I’ve had some friends in town for a few days askin’ around after rumors. You think no one knew about it?" The voice paused, expecting an answer; J.D., frozen by fear and memory, couldn’t give it. As if sensing this, the voice continued. "Well, seems stories get around after a while, and I personally don’t care how Alec came by it, but I can guess from your reaction it’s true."

"A- Alec? Alec Tolliver?" J.D. fought to keep his voice calm, but the crack in it betrayed his fear.

"Smart boy," the unseen voice said. "Yes, Alec Tolliver. His associate is George Fairman- you’ve heard of ‘em both, of course. And if you’ve heard of them both, you’ve probably heard of me. Now, enough of this. Let’s talk a bit more about Ma Hansen. Did she scream, J.D.?"

"No," whispered J.D. "No... no..."

Vin hit the ground running and didn’t quit until he exploded through the saloon doors, knocking aside any patrons unlucky enough to be in his way. Some growled with displeasure, but none made a move against him, knowing his status in the town and his reputation, and thus knowing best to keep out of his way.

"Nathan! Damn it, Nate! Where the hell are you?" Tanner shouted above the din and clatter of the crowded room. Jackson didn’t appear, but Ezra Standish did, wincing and holding a hand up to his ear.

"I don’t suppose one could prevail upon you, Mr. Tanner, to keep it down?" Ezra drawled irritably. "If you’re lookin’ for Mr. Jackson, I suggest you try his standard haunt- the clinic. Oh, but before you go, a letter came for you in the post. Our esteemed Mr. Wilkers-"

"What’s it say, Ezra?" Vin cut in impatiently, his gut-voice now screaming at him that something was so very, very wrong. The gambler, unheeding of Vin’s instincts, frowned at the interruption but cooperatively pulled out a thin sheet of paper from a battered envelope and began to read.
"It says, and I quote: ‘Tanner- payback is Hell. They’ll die and then you’ll die. Too bad I couldn’t get you that night in Missouri along with that friend of yours. Might have saved me an extra funeral to go to. I’m pretty sure you know who I am.’" Ezra refolded the paper and stuffed it back in the envelope. "Truly an intriguing missive, Mr. Tanner, and a grammatically stilted one at that. Might I inquire who ‘they’ are, and who this anonymous corresspondent is?"

"Jacob," whispered Vin. His world seemed a small space suddenly, contracted to only him and Ezra and centering on the letter the gambler held.

Jacob Sulla. Alive? Vin remembered a night years ago, a night of storms and chaos, with the body of his only friend lying in the rain with blood staining his shirt a light pink; then he remembered a day not long past that night, a day resplendent with the bright sun filtering dream-like through trees and glinting dully on the drying blood of a dying man who with his last breath pleaded his innocence and for his life.

"Wrong man... wrong man... oh, please God, wrong man..."

"Mr. Tanner?" Ezra gently touched Vin’s arm; the tracker jumped a mile, and Standish did too. After regaining some measure of his dignity and banishing the quaver from his voice, Ezra asked, "Is there something the matter?"

Blue eyes, chased by old ghosts and now something close to fury, met Ezra’s pale green and bewildered ones. "Yeah, Ez... go find Nathan. Meet me at my wagon in ten minutes- they got J.D., fuck it... they got the others, and we’ve gotta find ‘em."

Ezra’s eyes widened. "The others?" he echoed in disbelief, reaching over to a chair to pull his coat off the back and put it on. "Are you quite sure?"

"Yeah," Vin said shortly, already turning to head out the door.

As he jogged toward the livery to grab Peso, Vin’s mind whirled mercilessly.

Jacob Sulla... It couldn’t be anyone else. He knew exactly who had killed Bud, he knew that the man who had died that day by the trail to St. Louis had been Jacob Sulla- except it wasn’t, unless the man’s ghost came back from the grave to exact revenge. Unless... unless the man really did have a twin brother, Isaac Sulla. Tanner shook his head, trying not to think of that as he pulled Peso out of his stall and collected his gear.

Trying not to think of that possibilty, though, forced his thoughts to his friends and inevitably circled back to Jacob Sulla. The things the man had done to those families in that wagon train still made him blink, still made him pause to try to imagine the cruelty of it all.

"So who’d you pick this time?" Vin asked. He had spent the better part of the last fifteen minutes leaning against a post on the porch of the sheriff’s office, waiting for Bud to appear from his conference with the deputy. When his friend had finally materialized, Vin had straightened automatically, but Bud saw him nonetheless.

"Told you not to slouch, my friend," Bud murmured reprovingly as Vin shifted from foot to foot under his mentor’s steady stare, "it’s not good for your back."

"Screw my back--" Vin began impatiently.

"Thank you, I’d rather not," cut in Bud, grinning as he held out the WANTED poster for Vin to study. "Well, I think you’ll like this month’s selection, Vin," he continued, reading the large block printing on the parchment. "This time, it’s ‘Kansas’ Jake Sulla, wanted for the murder of three families in a wagon train heading for the Territory. Dead or alive, one thousand bucks."

"One thousand bucks?" whispered Vin, impressed. He stared at the picture of the man, committing it to memory; he studied the long, angular face framed by thin hair- dark, from the heavy concentration of ink- and the slanted eyes that, even in the bad artist’s rendering, glowed with dark fire.

"Yes, my young friend," Bud affirmed. "One thousand dollars. Really, it’s sort of a trifling amount, when you consider that those poor people watched their wagons get burnt with their children in them and then got to beg to be stabbed through the heart and wrapped up in some wagon tarping. Sick, sick bastards out there, Vin. Now let this be a lesson to you..."

"Yeah, yeah," broke in the younger man. "Them before us, them before us. You got a new tune, pard?"

"That’s the impatient Vin Tanner we know and love," Bud snickered. "An’ the only new tune I’m gonna be playing will be whatever I decide to play on my harp when I go to heaven."

"Hell, old man, that may not be too long from now."

"Might well be, Vin. Might well be."

"Mr. Tanner?"

Vin looked up. Ezra stood in the doorway of the livery, a dark silhouette in the dim light of the street behind him. "Are you coming, Mr. Tanner? It’s been ten minutes according to my pocketwatch, and I can assure you my-"

"Yeah, I know. It’s always right," Vin interrupted, picking up Peso’s reins to lead him out of the stable. "Let’s get goin’. I think we got a good trail t’ start out with- saw ‘em headin’ off to the west."

"By all means, Mr. Tanner..."

Vin mounted up and sent Peso out of the town limits at a quick lope, wanting to go faster but knowing he couldn’t. Not in this light, not with a track to follow, not with the need to make no mistakes. Nathan and Ezra followed behind him, not saying anything, seeing that Vin had gone somewhere where they could not follow, and wouldn’t want to.

Something alien had gripped their friend, Ezra thought as he trailed behind the tracker, unnerved by the intensity with which the younger man ignored them and devoted his entire attention to the track before them. The gambler suspected that he and Nathan could turn and head back, could fire off a few rounds, could do anything and Tanner would ignore them.

As if reading Ezra’s thoughts, Nathan nudged his mount closer to Standish and asked, in a voice barely loud enough to be heard, "You think he knows we’re here?"

"Oh, I believe he knows, Mr. Jackson," Ezra said after a moment’s consideration. "Whether or not he cares, however, is a different matter entirely. Even though we may be able to depart his company without eliciting a reaction from him, I believe it would behoove us to remain with him as long as possible." The healer seemed to accept the answer, however unwillingly; he nodded, and the two men rode in silence once more, and for a good while.

At length, Vin pulled Peso to a halt and reached for the canteen that hung from his pommel. Tanner unscrewed the top and took a quick drink before recapping the canteen and saying, "Well, I think I got a good idea where they’re goin’... track’s pretty solid- just two horses, one tied to the other."

"J.D.?" Ezra asked, and the tracker nodded.

"Yeah, him an’ whoever took him," Vin said, studying the ground. "They ain’t bein’ too careful about hidin’ their tracks, an’ there’s really only one place they could be goin’, if they was lookin’ for the nearest town."

"Where’s that?" Nathan inquired. "We’re nowhere near any of the trails goin’ to Eagle Bend or Bitter Creek."

"This trail don’t go nowhere, ‘cept Delphi," Vin grunted.

"Delphi?" echoed Ezra disbelievingly upon hearing the name of the destination of J.D.’s abductor. "I’m given to understand it’s much like Purgatory on one of its more peckish days, and it is a mortal insult to those towns lucky enough to be considered pestholes."

"Guess you could say that," Vin replied, still staring at the track and pointedly not looking at Ezra. "An’ that’s where they’re headed."

"And you know this how..?" Ezra inquired, curious as to how, exactly, Tanner had come by this knowledge.

"Just know," Vin said, shrugging. With that, he stowed the canteen in its proper place and urged Peso down the trail once more, uncaring as to whether or not Ezra and Nathan followed. Standish exchanged looks with Nathan, duplicated Vin’s shrug, and followed the tracker to Delphi.

CHAPTER FOUR

"Mr. Larabee? You awake?"

No, Chris tried to tell himself over and over again. No, I’m not awake.

"Yes you are," the voice said. "I know you’re awake. And you know how I know? Well, see, I know that the Godawful-almighty Chris Larabee would never pretend to sleep when he could spit in his enemy’s face. That is, unless something’s changed, maybe? What could it me, Mr. Larabee? What could’ve changed so much that you ain’t got the stomach to open your eyes an’ look your enemy in the face?"

I’m not awake... Chris insisted.

"Is the Godawful-almighty Chris Larabee afraid?" mocked the voice. "What’s he afraid of?"
"Nothin’, you son of a bitch," Chris rasped from between gritted teeth, refusing to open his eyes. The voice laughed at that, a creaky, stuffy sort of laugh.

"Oh, nothin’?" the voice asked sarcastically, and for the first time, Chris heard an accent filter through the teasing words. Kentucky, it sounded like. "Sounds t’ me like you’re scared to open them damn frightenin’ eyes a’ yours. The Larabee Glare, they call it. Me, I ain’t to impressed when a man won’t even open his eyes t’ see me."

Kentucky?

Maybe... heat pressed down on him and made his head cloudy with trying to keep his thoughts straight. Could be the man was from Kentucky. Maybe. Could be. Chris shook his head, trying to clear the cotton out.

Only made him dizzy, and he gasped with nausea.

"Damnation, looks like you’re gonna pass out again," the voice said regretfully, its tone twisted by the waves of heat that battered Chris’s body. "Before you leave me this time, Chris Larabee, I was just wonderin’... I didn’t get much of a reaction from ya when I asked ya about your wife n’ boy..."

"Go to hell..." Chris managed to say, his throat raw.

"Hmmm... I’m guessin’ we’re already here, an’ I’m your personal demon," the voice responded with false cheer. "Now, what are we gonna do next? What should we think about, you an’ I?"
"How ‘bout me gettin’ outta these chains an’ makin’ you bleed?"

"Quit fussin’, Larabee," the voice said irritably, the accent thickening and then unexpectedly dropping away, "an’ pay attention. Not gonna bug ya about your family- guess you’ve gotten that sorta treatment before. So I’m gonna ask ya... how many people died, do ya think, ‘cause of you? How many people do you think died ‘cause you figured you might as well keep your reputation, seein’ as you’d lost everythin’ else?

"Study on it awhile, why don’t ya."

Chris didn’t much want to study it, but the relentless heat seemed to carry the words the owner of the voice had spoken, to twist them around so they corkscrewed into Chris’s ears and lodged in his brain.

How many people died, do ya think?

                ‘Cause of you...

Keep your reputation...

        Lost everythin’...

‘Cause of you...

        ....people died...

Ezra sat by the tiny campfire, idly feeding the flames their meager supper of dry wood. Certainly a better repast than the one he himself had been afforded, the gambler thought after staring at a particularly delectable-looking stick; the jerky and biscuits he’d barely had time to purloin hardly constituted sustenance, let alone fine dining.

And by the powers above, he was starving, if a gentleman would ever admit to being so.

Nathan slept next to him, worn out from watching over the town in general and the sick people who’d seen fit to descend on his clinic during the day. Ezra kept the silence only partly for him; the other man who sat across the fire from him, certainly wasn’t inclined to talk. Instead, he either stared into the fire or into the darkness- most impolite, the gambler thought; but then, politeness was usually not Vin Tanner’s strong suit, even when it came to giving his two trail-weary compatriots a rest.

It had taken the thirteenth labor of Hercules to get Vin to stop for the night; Ezra seriously doubted that the young man would have stopped if Nathan hadn’t pointed out that the terrain around them had more holes in it than Vin himself after a gunfight and they couldn’t risk losing a horse or Vin himself.

"C’mon Vin," Nathan had said, with a persuasiveness that Ezra rather admired, "we gotta stop for the night. Ain’t no way you’d have any kind of horse under you tomorrow, an’ I don’t wanna waste bandages an’ catgut stitchin’ you up after findin’ your carcass next to a gopher hole."

"Indeed, Mr. Tanner, I believe that our medically-inclined associate is correct," the gambler had chipped in, pressing the attack against the steely, unrelenting face that stared at them from atop Peso. "The chances of us keeping to the correct trail while contending with the dark and Lord only knows what else are not good- and as you know, I am not a man of chance."

Vin had graced them with a ghost of a smile at that before saying, "Fine- go ‘head an’ set up camp. I’ll scout out a lil’ farther, make sure we’re still on the right path."

"You will be coming back to us, Mr. Tanner?" Ezra asked and then added, "Tonight, of course, as opposed to tomorrow morning?"

"You got it, Ez."

The tracker had kept to his promise, as the solemn young face staring at Ezra from across the fire would attest.

No, not solemn... serious. Grave. Somber. Grim. Standish ran through his mental thesaurus of words to describe what he saw on Vin’s face and in his eyes. For the first time in a long time, Ezra couldn’t find the word, could only think on how no one term could fully encompass what he could see of Tanner’s face, half-encased in flickering shadows as it was.

That turned Ezra’s thoughts more fully onto Vin, and he sighed as he poked at some dying embers with a stick; they flared briefly to life and then died into ash. So much like Mr. Tanner’s temper, the gambler ruminated- poke at it, kick it, shout at it, throw things at it... a quick flare-up would be all that one was likely to get before it vanished under a laconic facade of which Ezra was singularly jealous.

It hardly seemed fair- his thoughts took off on a tangent- that such a young man could have a poker face of which the best and brightest of the Orleans gambling tables would be horribly, venomously jealous...

Except now a cold fire burned in the tracker’s eyes, a fire which Ezra had seen once before in the eyes of a jungle cat he’d seen in a menagerie once. Even from behind the bars of its cage, the cat’s eyes had glowed with a feral certainty, a confidence in its own power and superiority. Not pride, the gambler supposed, but rather a profound knowing of its own power as a hunter.
And Mr. Tanner, oh Lord, he most certainly was a hunter.

Oftentimes, especially when he’d see the young man leaning on a post in front of the sheriff’s office or engaged in banter with one of his friends, Ezra would forget that hunter and see a young man- not much more than a boy, really, with a shy, slow grin and a polite word for passersby. With a slight twinge of guilt, Ezra remembered the fumbling, painfully polite tracker who’d come to him one night and asked him to write out his poem for him.

Hunters and poetry... they didn’t seem to go together. A boy and a man who could kill an animal or a man with equal thought given to both... they didn’t seem to go together, either. Two people seemed to live in Vin Tanner. He’d long-since left the dry-humored, polite, awkward boy back in town.

The hunter stayed with them now, staring fixedly into the flames.

Ezra shuddered.

"You cold, Ez?"

Standish looked up at the voice, wondering if the question was rhetorical- he heard no concern in it. "No, Mr. Tanner," Ezra said after deciding to answer. "No, I am not, even though our hasty departure from town precluded me from procuring anything more suited to these hellishly cold nights."

"Always thought hell was s’poseta be hot," Tanner replied, still staring. The comment sounded automatic.

"Indeed, many suppose it to be so, although Dante reserves ice and cold for the deepest, most horrible circles of Hell."

"Dante?"

Ezra breathed a sigh of relief- at least Vin had become communicative, although he continued to gaze fixedly into some vision he saw in the fire. "Dante Alighieri," the gambler said quickly, trying to mend a silence he found himself to be acutely uncomfortable with. "He was an Italian poet who penned ‘The Inferno’, a narration of his journey through Hell. According to him, Hell was arranged in circles and the deeper one went the worse the sin; each circle had its own specific, symbolic punishment to be meted out for eternity. For example, the grafters and conmen were consigned to the Eighth Circle to be trapped in pitch and tortured by demons with hooks. A fate I fully expect to meet some day."

Vin actually smiled a little bit at that before sobering- the smile vanished as if it had never existed. "You think there’s a Hell for people who make a life of killin’?" he asked softly.

"Well, it has been quite a long time since I last read ‘The Inferno," Ezra said, "however, I’m sure God is open to negotiations and takes into account extenuating circumstances."

"I sure hope so, Ez," Vin whispered, his voice cracking.

"I am almost positive," Standish returned, trying to reassure the young man; Vin must have seen his intention, for the brief flash of agony faded just like that smile did. "God himself recommends confessors, I believe- if it would ease your mind, I would be glad to hear the backstory to our present situation."

"Don’t know if I can tell it," Vin rasped, looking up over Ezra’s shoulder and into the night.

Ezra fought the urge to turn around and try to see what Vin saw- he knew it wouldn’t work, knew whatever Vin saw could be seen by the sharpshooter’s eyes alone. Instead, Standish contented himself with saying, "There are many things I have done on which I cannot reflect with satisfaction- especially considering the fact that life in this town has unexpectedly inflicted me with a conscience. There are doubtless things in your past of which you are not proud, and one of these things now leads us on this wild-goose chase to Delphi. As a participant in said goose chase, and as a friend, I would like to know what distresses you."

Vin finally fixed haunted eyes on Ezra, and the gambler felt an unfamiliar gush of sadness at the torment in those depths. "I’ll tell ya, Ez," Tanner whispered finally, "but ya gotta promise..."
"Not a word will ever pass my lips," Ezra assured him. Tanner blinked and nodded, as if reaching a decision.

"Before my ma died," Vin whispered, his eyes distant with memory, "she told me I was a Tanner, an’ I decided right then an’ there I was gonna live up to bein’ one. You know why?"
Ezra shook his head.

"’Cause it was the only thing I had that was good, after her," Vin said. "’Cause a lil’ kid, he thinks the best of his ma. I don’t know anythin’ about her, but I what I remember of her is everythin’ good I ever had in my life... and I guessed that’s what a Tanner was.

"An’ one day... one day, I forgot it."

CHAPTER FIVE

He couldn’t say when, exactly, he’d forgotten it. Always, always it lodged in the back of his mind, subconsciously directing his thoughts and actions, or the guilt that flooded him after doing something he’d known instinctively a Tanner- or a decent human being, for that matter- didn’t do. Still, ‘good’ and ‘decent’ had little place in his life for so long. Vin swallowed thickly at thinking about that, about the past twenty or so years- he’d lost track- spent in killing and blood, whether animal or man.

"I ain’t tellin’ ya everythin’," Vin said firmly, unwilling to deal with the flood of emotions that threatened to break through the careful walls he’d erected after so long. "Just about Jacob Sulla."
"Mr. Tanner," Ezra admonished, "I am hardly expecting an autobiography or any heartwrenching sentiment in your story- I merely seek information, so that I don’t feel as if I’m stumbling around a dark room."

"Fair enough," Vin muttered, and took a deep breath.

"After I quit buffalo huntin’, I was lookin’ around for somethin’ t’ do... Somethin’ I was good at. Shoulda realized the only thing I was good at was more killin’- if I couldn’t shoot a buffalo, might as well shoot a human bein’." The tracker’s voice was bitter. "Was in this pissant town in Kansas one day when I heard gunshots. Turned out the bank was bein’ held up, an’ weren’t no one around t’ stop it. Didn’t think much about shootin’ this one huge bastard who’d drug a lady outta the bank with ‘im t’ keep the teller from shootin’ him while he got away. Guess he didn’t figger on someone standin’ behind ‘im, or maybe he figgered no one’d lift a hand- or a gun- t’ stop ‘im.
"Anyway, I shot ‘im, an’ I saw this older fella walk up t’ the body an’ pull a poster out. He looked back n’ forth b’tween the two for a minute, then stood up an’ walked over t’ me, asked me if I knew I’d just shot a guy worth three hundred bucks back in Missouri, an’ then he wanted t’ know how I’d gotten a head-shot with this beat-up ol’ rifle I was carryin’ . ‘Course, I told him no, t’ both questions..."

Vin broke off his speech to sip his coffee and stare into the fire. For the first time since J.D.’s abduction earlier that day, Ezra saw those blue eyes shine with fond memory- not that there were many of those in the sharpshooter’s past, Standish supposed. The tracker set the coffee cup down in the dirt next to his foot and hunched closer to the fire, as if seeing images twisting in the flames.

"I’ll never fergit what he said t’ me when he stood up from lookin’ at that body. ‘Ah, the-- the nayev-’ Fuck..." Vin paused and started over. "Don’t rightly know how ya say it, but it was somethin’ about bein’ in the dark... of youth."

"Naivete," put in Ezra.

"Yeah, that," Vin said gratefully. "Took me over t’ the sheriff’s office himself an’ got the bounty for me. Then he introduced himself as Bud. Weren’t his real name, he said, but it beat William Carlisle O’Shea-Florinton, Junior by a country mile. He was an older fella- guess maybe a bit older n’ Chris, but with more piss in ‘im than a whole Army camp. Anyhow, he was a college graduate an’ war vet’ran from back East who didn’t figure he could go back t’ bein’ a teacher in some fancy school somewheres, so he went out West an’ became a bounty hunter.
"He taught me pretty much everythin’ on how t’ track a person- kept insistin’ it ain’t like trackin’ buffalo, an’ he was right. I was twenty-three ‘r so, an’ didn’t know th’ first thing about followin’ a person. ‘People ain’t dumb animals’, Bud said, ‘they’re dangerous animals- you can git trampled by a buffalo, but a person can torture ya, shoot ya, drown ya, beat ya six ways from Sunday so’s you spend the rest ‘a your life suckin’ your food through a straw.’ He made me his partner... an’ we had some good times t’gether."

Ezra sensed there was more to the relationship than Vin let on, but decided to let the matter slide and allow the younger man to tell the story in his own time. Vin took another sip of coffee and continued.

"T’ make a long story short, one day we got the bounty poster for Jacob Sulla- I’m guessin’ you already know about that." Ezra nodded and Vin kept on, speaking around the rim of his cup. "The marshals had gotten Tolliver n’ Fairman just a few days after they hit that wagon train, but Sulla’d escaped an’ the government put out a thousand-dollar bounty on ‘im; shit, every town we went by there was someone lookin’ for Sulla, an’ a few people got bounties put on their own head by killin’ fellow hunters. We followed Sulla through the Territory an’ tracked him to a tiny town called Coleville, near the Missouri border..."

Vin looked away, blinking rapidly to clear his eyes of tears and trying to regain his composure. "Bud figured we was gettin’ close. He had this sense of it, whenever we were right near someone we was trackin’."

Ezra figured Vin had gotten that uncanny instinct of his from that man, and suddenly had a premonition of how the story would end. Mr. Florinton- Bud- had not merely been Vin’s partner, he’d been a mentor and, even more importantly to the young tracker, a friend. "Mr. Tanner, I believe I know how this will-"

"No, Ez, ya don’t," Vin quavered. "Ya probably guessed at some of it, but you’re just guessin’ at the beginnin’ of alla this, not the end.

"You’re thinkin’ Jake Sulla shot Bud, right?"

"I am," Ezra conceeded.

"You’d be right on that," Vin muttered. "He shot Bud right in th’ middle of a thunderstorm- Bud never knew what hit ‘im. An’ I... I couldn’t do shit, could just run an’ hide like some godfuckingdamn scared, green-assed kid." Venom and self-hatred dripped from the words as the sharpshooter continued with his story. "I spent th’ rest of the money me an’ Bud had t’ bury him proper, n’ I told ‘im I’d track an’ kill Jake Sulla if it was the last thing I’d do."

Any remnant of good memory vanished as Vin set down the cup once more; his voice took on a low, monotone quality which chilled Ezra to hear. "I tracked Sulla day n’ night through Missouri, headin’ straight for St. Louis. Caught up to ‘im one mornin’... an’ I killed ‘im."

"A laudatory gesture," commented Ezra, wondering what had Vin so upset.

"Didn’t just kill him," Vin said, now speaking in a choked whisper. "When I lived with th’ Comanches, I learned how t’ torture a man so’s he’d beg you t’ cut off any part of his body ya wanted, how t’ make a man offer ya his wife n’ kids just so long as ya killed ‘im n’ put him outta his misery... how t’ cut someone so they didn’t die from blood loss before ya wanted ‘em to.

"If’n ya do it right, there’s a way you c’n cut a man’s wrists so’s he knows he’s dyin’- it’ll take ‘im about two hours ‘r so, but those two hours... Shit." Vin paused and shook his head. "I kept at ‘im for a good four hours- found ‘im sometime midmornin’, didn’t leave the forest until the day’d gotten a good start on the afternoon. When I bundled ‘im up, he was still alive... couldn’t talk no more ‘cause he was havin’ trouble breathin’, on account of the broken ribs piercin’ his lungs- he’d got those when I tossed ‘im on his horse."

Ezra had to remind himself to keep breathing as he stared at the young man across from him; Vin returned the gaze with a flat, chilling scrutiny, and Ezra forced himself to look away. He couldn’t reconcile that cold distance to the Vin Tanner he knew- he couldn’t even reconcile it to any other person he’d ever met. The icy blue eyes seemed almost reptilian for a moment, before they melted under the onslaught of something Ezra hadn’t expected to see.

Regret.

"Didn’t regret it f’r an instant, Ezra," Vin said softly, looking away from the gambler. "I laughed when he kept askin’ me t’ kill ‘im, when he kept beggin’ me t’ just leave him be an’ let him die..." Tanner’s eyes went distant with memory. "Didn’t get a drop a’ blood on me- got it all over my jacket, sure, but them stains came out okay... nothin’ on my hands ‘r face.

"Got a fuckin’ ton of it on my soul, though," he whispered brokenly and buried his face in his hands. "Oh, shit... Jesus Christ... he’s got Chris n’ the others... oh, God..."

"Mr. Tanner," Ezra said, finding himself floundering in that dark room he’d specifically requested Vin’s help in escaping, "by your own admission, Jacob Sulla is dead."

"No, he ain’t," Vin rasped. "’Cause the story ain’t done yet..."

Something cold and hard settled in Ezra’s stomach.

"The man I killed... he kept yellin’ that I’d gotten the wrong man. Hollered it over n’ over, kept sayin’ his name was Isaac, that he n’ Jacob were twin brothers n’ that Jacob had already gone back to Kentucky. Shit, Ez, I didn’t believe him."

"You had no reason to, Mr. Tanner," Ezra pointed out. "Most murderers do not number honesty among their virtues."

"It don’t matter," Vin retorted, then pinned Ezra with a knowing look. "You ever kill someone an’ enjoyed every second of it? I ain’t talkin’ about what we do here- I’m talkin’ about wantin’ t’ dance on someone’s bones, but the only thing that’s stoppin’ ya is knowin’ you got to have a body for a lawman to identify. You ever do that, Ezra?"

"I can’t say as I have, Mr. Tanner," Standish replied. Vin sat back, cold triumph on his face.
"Never felt like that b’fore, Ez," Vin said, shaking his head in disbelief, "an’ never felt that way again. I hauled that body in n’ got my bounty... Didn’t even bother countin’ the bills I got from the sheriff- ain’t no way a chickenshit guy like him would even think a’ shortchangin’ a man who make your death last as long’s he wanted it to." Vin paused, taking a deep breath. "That don’t matter now... what matters is that I was wrong, an’ my friends are payin’ for it. Shit, I think I been payin’ for it ever since that day."

"Would you mind clarifying, Mr. Tanner?"

"Just now thought of it, Ez," Vin muttered, almost to himself. "You think Eli Joe was part o’ my punishment, for bein’ wrong, for wantin’ t’ kill a man an’ not carin’ whether or not he was the right one?"

Ezra sucked in his breath, weighing his answer. Before he could reply, though, a sharp cracking of dead wood echoed in the night.

Vin surged to his feet and yanked his mare’s leg out of its holster in one fluid motion, and Ezra had his gun out just as swiftly. "Show yourself," the gambler demanded of the darkness. No other sound came for a moment, but then Ezra could make out a soft shush-shush sound, the sound of boots dragging against the ground.

Buck appeared at the edge of the circle of light cast by the campfire, his horse’s reins clasped loosely in one hand. Crimson painted one side of his face, the sick brown of dried blood decorated the left side of his jacket and stained the bandanna knotted around his upper left arm. Dirt liberally coated his entire body, and the blue eyes that usually snapped with vigor and good humor were dull and lifeless.

"Goin’ t’ Delphi?" Buck slurred. He staggered sideways and would have fallen if Ezra hadn’t lunged to catch him and break his fall.

"Thanss, Ez," the gunfighter breathed gratefully. "Yer a real pal."

"Do not mention it, Mr. Wilmington," Ezra said, then redirected his attention to Vin, who stood frozen. Sensing the sharpshooter needed something to take his mind off the latest reminder of his guilt, Ezra suggested to him, "Why don’t you rouse Mr. Jackson, Vin, as it appears that our compatriot will require some medical attention?"

"Yeah," Vin rasped, licking his lips. "Yeah... yeah, sure." He turned and stumbled over to where Nathan slept; it took a few hard nudges to wake the healer, but Jackson pulled himself from his blankets the second he heard that Buck was injured. Grabbing his supply kit, Nathan wound his way over to Wilmington and knelt down next to him.

"Any idea how this happened?" Nathan asked.

Ezra glanced at Vin, who had paled slightly.

"Yeah," Tanner whispered, blinking. "Yeah, I do."

CHAPTER SIX

Nathan knelt over Buck and probed as gently as he possibly could for the bullet embedded somewhere in Buck’s shoulder. Every now and then, the unconscious man groaned and shifted in response to a pain that even exhaustion could not mask. With a grunt of triumph, Jackson closed his forceps around the slug and extracted it, maneuvering the bullet back up through torn tissues and into the open air. He dropped the bullet in the dirt, not seeing Vin swoop forward and pick it up.

Swiftly, Nathan packed the wound with carbolic-drenched bandages and wrapped up Buck’s shoulder, unheeding of Ezra’s complaints as the gambler lifted Buck’s torso to let the healer get the bandages in place. Ezra slowly laid Buck down and Jackson handed him a water canteen.

"You mind holdin’ this while I clean his wounds?" Nathan asked. He didn’t ask so much as expect Ezra to help him; sensing this, Ezra sighed and took the canteen, shifting his position to follow Nathan as the healer made a slow circuit around Buck’s body. Methodically, Nathan cleaned and bandaged some cuts, picked cactus spines out of Buck’s lower legs, and disinfected what he could with the limited supply of carbolic on hand. The process stretched out over the course of an hour, with Vin watching from the distant shadows and Ezra hovering, unacknowledged, over Buck.

"Will Mr. Wilmington rejoin the land of the living any time soon?" Ezra questioned, glancing at the gunfighter’s pale face that glistened with the water Nathan had been diligently applying.

"Might... wanna... ask a man... t’ his face..." croaked Buck. "Where’d... where’d... that damn train... go..?"

"On to Delphi, I do believe, Mr. Wilmington," Ezra said, trying to find a more comfortable position on the hard ground. It didn’t work.

"Figgered..," Buck wheezed.

"Did you manage to ascertain the identity of your assailants, Mr. Wilmington?" Ezra asked, unable to keep silent while engaged in the onerous task of holding a canteen of water for the healer’s use. Buck’s head lolled in Ezra’s direction, and puffy eyelids slid back enough to regard the gambler.

"Was... was already outta there... didn’ see ‘em..."

"It was Tolliver n’ Fairman," Vin interposed.

Ezra saw the sense in not arguing with Vin, especially when the man was more than likely right. Buck lurched a bit at that revelation. "T- Tolliver?" he rasped, eyes widening a little. "Shit."

"He oughtn’t talk," Nathan interjected, frowning at Ezra and Vin both. "Buck needs his sleep... we’re gonna haveta figure out a way to get him back to town- he can’t stay out here like this. That bullet wound’s gonna get infected, an’ he’s already running a pretty good fever... Yeah, no two ways about it- I’m gonna haveta get Buck back home to fix him up." He darted glances between the two men watching him. "I can get him back home an’ settled in okay, make sure he’s stable and have Mary tend him so I can meet you at Delphi."

"Is there a timeframe for this trifling activity?" Ezra inquired, toying with the canteen and wishing it were a deck of cards. He had some in his pocket... maybe... He frowned and forced his mind back to the matter at hand.

Jackson sat back on his heels, studying Buck’s pale face for a moment before replying. "I can be at Delphi in two days," he said finally. "That should be enough time t’ see him stable, an’ Mary shouldn’t have any problems with him."

"No."

Both Ezra and Nathan looked up sharply at the tracker’s flat negation. A taut, uncomfortable silence stretched, broken finally by Ezra’s asking, "And might we enquire into the reasons behind this terse, yet vehement refusal, Mr. Tanner?"

Naked pain shone in Vin’s eyes; he shook his head in frustration and several times he opened his mouth as if to start speaking, but only closed it and started over. Finally, he said, "They’d find ya, Nathan, an’ take both you an’ Buck. You’d never get anywhere near Four Corners before... before..."

"I believe I understand Mr. Tanner’s objection," Ezra interposed and then, remembering that Nathan had slept through Vin’s narration and deciding Vin would rather not reiterate it, explained. "He is concerned that those we hunt will not hesitate to take advantage of a healer guarding a wounded man. Even assuming that you reached Four Corners without incident, by no means would you be safe there, let alone riding by yourself on the return journey to Delphi."

"He needs help," Nathan insisted. "And it’s help I can’t give him here. I’m out of carbolic as it is, and I won’t be much good to Chris or Josiah if I can’t get more."

"What is the status of any medical facility in Delphi?" Ezra asked the general audience; in reply, Vin grimaced and spat. "A truly eloquent reply, Mr. Tanner," Ezra replied dryly. "However, there must be something in the way of a doctor’s or some... some... sawbones." Standish’s lips twisted around the unfamiliar colloquialism.

"Ain’t no one there I’d trust Buck to," Vin snorted, kicking at the dirt like a nervous horse. "Hell, wouldn’t trust my worst enemy to ‘em."

"There you have it," Ezra sighed. "We will have to reach a decision before long, however." He paused, knowing he would regret his suggestion, but voiced it anyway. "What if I escorted Mr. Jackson and Mr. Wilmington back to Four Corners under cover of darkness and return that same way in two day’s time? Two riding together, two men who know that they are riding through dangerous territory, would have a considerably better chance than just one."

Vin shook his head. "They could be waitin’ out there, Ez. Shit, the only reason they ain’t pulled an ambush is because there ain’t anywhere to ambush from in daylight."

"We can leave..." Ezra could hardly believe he was suggesting this, but the words tumbled out of his mouth without prior consent, "We can leave at daybreak. I will conduct Messrs. Jackson and Wilmington to Four Corners and thence to Mr. Larabee’s shack, if I have enough reason to suspect that we have not been followed."

"An’ if you have?" Vin demanded. "What then?"

Ezra shrugged helplessly, unable to formulate an answer.

"Shit." Vin spat the word out as if it tasted bad. "Might as well ride back with ya an’ start out again t’morrow on fresh horses. Might as well tie Buck to his horse an’ ride back like the devil’s up our ass." He kicked viciously at the dirt, as if it were guilty of something.

Standish saw how much is cost the younger man to say that, to admit they had to postpone his hunt, and knew that Vin would be biting back the one question that would tear the soul out of Nathan- what if those two days meant the difference between the others living and dying? Three men out there, possibly being sacrificed to save one; Ezra knew that Nathan would be aware of it, but also that the healer could do nothing with what he had. Which was, Ezra thought bleakly, nothing.

Only Vin’s guilt kept him from voicing that demand- the guilt of already having one friend wounded for sure, the guilt of having three others disappear into the unknown, and now threatening to drag yet two more into this horror with him.

All the tracker wanted to do was hunt, Ezra thought. Vin had never counted on human emotion sullying what was, to him, so obvious an action.

"There ain’t nothin but bad decisions, Vin," Nathan said softly, not moving from Buck’s side. "If’n there were some way we could take Buck with us, believe me, I’d do it in a heartbeat. If’n there were some way we could hide him out here, I’d do it. But we gotta get back to town, else I won’t be any good to Chris, Josiah, or J.D. with just a pair a’ hands, an’ you said yourself Delphi won’t help us any."

Vin nodded, not looking at either Ezra, Nathan, or Buck.

"I’ll take first watch then," he said softly. "Ez, you go second, an’ we’ll leave before first light. Mean to get a good piece back to Four Corners before the sun gets too high."

"A sound plan," Ezra approved, although he knew Vin would care little for his approval. "And now I shall attempt to salvage at least some of my beauty sleep, which our erstwhile friend Mr. Wilmington has seen fit to disrupt." With that, Ezra made his way over to his bedroll and, upon his head making contact with his saddle, fell asleep.

Silently, Vin picked up his rifle and stalked over to Nathan; the healer felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle as the sharpshooter knelt behind him.

"How’s he doin’?" Vin asked, his voice the merest suggestion of a whisper.

"Right now, he’s doin’ okay," Nathan said, adjusting the blankets covering Buck. "I’ll feel a lot better when he’s back in town, though. Spendin’ a night in the desert ain’t never done much good in the way of healin’ up a bad bullet wound."

A soft laugh rumbled in Vin’s chest. "Reckon you’re right," he said, studying Buck intently before redirecting that piercing gaze to Nathan. Jackson shifted a little, unnerved at the way those blue eyes seemed to gather light to them, like cat eyes. "Nate," Vin began, his voice rough. "I’m sorry as hell for doin’ this to ya."

Nathan smiled. "It ain’t nothin’, Vin. Bein’ with Chris these past two years’s taught me somethin’ about havin’ people gunnin’ for a man. There ain’t many people I’d stand in front of a gun for, Vin, but I reckon you an’ Chris are a couple of ‘em."

An emotion that Nathan couldn’t identify worked its way across the sharpshooter’s face. It looked like pain almost, mixed with something that, in another man and at another time, Nathan would call pleasure. As it was, the look reminded Jackson of a man who’d received the unexpected news that his friend had survived a dangerous illness... or that he himself had been granted a stay of execution.

Vin coughed to break the moment and asked, "There any others on that list?"

"Yeah," Nathan laughed. "Four more."

"Ezra one of those?"

"I heard that, Mr. Tanner." Standish’s sleepy, disgruntled voice wafted up from his bedroll; the sharpshooter and the healer both exchanged looks and broke into quiet laughter.

CHAPTER SEVEN

"Josiah, you think there’s really a heaven?" the girl asked. Hell, not girl any more- Josiah didn’t quite know what to call the creature that rocked back and forth in the old wooden chair. He wondered if she had even meant to ask him that question; she had that mad glint in her eye, a faraway stare, that usually meant whatever she said couldn’t be taken seriously.

"Father’d kill you if he heard you askin’ that," Josiah pointed out, trying to make a joke.
The laugh that erupted from her lips chilled him. "Which father?" she asked. "Our Father, Father DeCordova, or God the Father? Hee hee!" She kicked her legs out and squirmed like a child being tickled, her heels scraping the floor with a harsh sound of worn leather soles on gritty stone.

"All of them, I guess," Josiah said slowly.

"Father can fuck Father DeCordova, an’ God can do the same thing," the girl spat, flinging herself onto the back of the seat; the chair tilted precariously on the rear end of its rockers. It hung there, about to fall over backwards and Josiah poised to intercept it, but rocked forward. She began to shift her hips back and forth as if riding a cantering horse. "Ride ‘em, cowboy," she muttered under her breath.

"Look," Josiah sighed, trying to keep a tight rein on his temper, "I don’t have any call to judge you, but the only way I can get you out of here is if you help me." He gestured to indicate the tiny room and its furnishings- the narrow bed he sat on, the rocking chair she rode, the rough wooden bureau shoved in the corner with a dead flower stuck in a chipped pottery vase. The petals of the rose had blackened and now all but three had fallen off the stem.

"Don’t want to leave," she said defiantly, glaring at him from under her cap of ill-kempt gray hair. "Like it just fine where I am, and damn you all anyhow."

"I don’t want to see you here," Josiah breathed, wishing she could understand- would allow herself to understand. "Jesus, I can’t see you here."

"Get used to it," she retorted, wrapping her shawl more closely around her body and rocking with a fierce concentration. "Git along lil’ doggie," she mumbled, her left wrist twisting as if twirling a lariat. Josiah saw the thin, thread-like scars on that pale skin and winced.

"How are your hands feelin’?" he asked.

"Damn fine," she said, not even looking at him, her eyes fixed with manic intentness on cattle and trails only she could see. "Keep ‘em comin’, Jones!" she hollered.

"Havin’ fun?" he asked sarcastically.

"Drivin’ cattle ain’t fun," she responded, favoring him with an arrogant glance as if eyeing him from atop her horse. "It’s work. Good, honest motherfucking work."

He tried to remind himself that the cursing wasn’t a new thing- she’d been doing it more or less ever since Father had read her the riot act on blasphemy. Josiah didn’t want to notice the bruises that still discolored her pale skin; ever since his father had first locked her up she hadn’t been as quick to heal as she’d been before. Nowadays, just knocking her hip against a corner of her bed would produce a spectacular purple welt, as if someone’d struck her.

"You feelin’ okay, girl?" he asked sympathetically, trying to keep a conversation going.
"Just fine."

Frustration boiled up in Josiah- not frustration at her, for her lack of co-operation, but frustration at himself for not being able to reach her. Frustration quickly turned into guilt as he watched the slender scars warp around the tightening skin of her wrists, and he thought about that day...

That day... God, he didn’t want to think about that day...

Josiah fought his way out of the nightmare, twisting his way back to reality. When he realized that he was still bound, still in the dark, he groaned and closed his eyes again. He heard a rustling sound; other than that goddamned voice and its tormenting questions, his little corner of hell had been quiet.

"Who’s there?" he demanded, his voice raspy from dehydration.

"J- Josiah?" quavered a new voice. It shook with exhaustion and barely-suppressed fear, but Josiah would know those familiar accents anywhere.

"Good Lord, J.D.?"

"Yeah," J.D. responded, his voice just as hoarse as Josiah’s. "They got... they got you too, huh? On the way back from Eagle Bend?"

"Yup," Josiah grated, wondering when the back of his throat had been replaced with sand. The image made him want to laugh, but he knew laughing would hurt and very likely alarm J.D., so he held it back. When his shoulders shook from suppressing that laughter, both his arms convulsed and the sharp spikes on his manacles dug into his wrists. The pain they elicited drove away all thought of mirth from his mind and left him gasping.

"Are... are you OK, Josiah?" asked J.D. from somewhere in the darkness.

"Well as can be expected, Brother Dunne."

"Now isn’t this touching?"

Josiah stiffened at the voice, quivering as helpless fury welled up in him upon hearing those sleek, patronizing tones. He heard J.D. try to hide a gasp, the attempt marred by a sharp, hissing intake of breath. The voice laughed at that, high and shrill and false- almost like the way Ezra laughed when confronted with someone he neither liked or respected.

"Kid, I couldn’t drag much outta you other than ‘please’ and ‘no, no, no.’ Now, I’m real glad you learned your manners, seein’ as it’s pretty impolite to burn down your hostess’ house right on top of her. Ain’t it?"

J.D. remained silent.

"Well, kid? I asked you a question." Josiah heard a swishing sound followed by a dull thud of something hard striking flesh. J.D. yelped in pain, a ragged yowl torn from a dry and abused throat.

"Leave him alone," Josiah ordered as firmly as he could.

"Wasn’t talkin’ to you, Preacher," retorted the voice. "Now kid, I brought you here so you could spill your guts to your friend Josiah here. He’s got his own demons, but I figure he can put them aside long enough to deal with yours- after all, it’s what all good preachers do, ain’t it? Now, you got the next couple of hours t’ get the blood of Ma Hansen off your soul and then... well, then George is going to have to send you to the next plane of existence, if you get my meaning."

"Go... go t’ hell," J.D. choked out.

"Oh, you’re probably goin’ there first, kid. Alec, he says Tanner’s gettin’ close, an’ I wouldn’t want you dyin’ with too much guilt on your conscience- it’s Tanner I want, not you. You... you’re just convenient."

Vin? Josiah wondered, trying to figure out what the tracker had to do with all of this.

"Yes, Vin Tanner," the voice affirmed, and Josiah realized that he’d spoken the sharpshooter’s name aloud. "Oh, sweet, dependable Vin Tanner," the voice spat. "Alec an’ George brought me all kinds of stories about your precious tracker- ain’t it somethin’ how a scum-lickin’ murderer can turn all noble? Really, it’s pretty amazin’, when you think about it."

Alec? George? Josiah ran the names through his brain and sucked in a breath when he realized who they were. Oh, sweet God the Father... Tolliver and Fairman. He vaguely remembered the voice telling him about Tolliver at an earlier point during this interminable night, but not Fairman. Who the hell hired them? Whoever’s in this room with me, obviously... but who’s he?

"See, Mr. Sanchez, your precious Mr. Tanner... he’s been known to kill the wrong man from time to time an’ do it without regret. Imagine livin’ with the Indians helps out in that department, don’t you think?"

"If you’re talkin’ about Jess Kincaid..."

"Oh, not him. Yeah, I know about the whole Eli Joe thing," the voice replied, its tone almost conversational and obliging- it sent chills down Josiah’s spine. "It’s wonderfully ironic, though, Tanner bein’ framed like that, draggin’ the wrong body back like he’d done Lord knows how many times before that. Only that time, he got himself caught- and it weren’t even his fault!" the voice crowed.

"You kin to Kincaid?" demanded Josiah, forcing himself to speak even though his abused throat rebelled against it.

"Kincaid? Oh, no. Not him," the voice said. "Kin to Isaac Sulla, dear brother murdered by said Mr. Tanner. Dear, sweet... innocent brother, tortured and allowed to die by God’s grace."

"Isaac Sulla..?" Josiah asked, licking his lips as sick realization dawned in him.

"Yes, and that would make me Jacob Sulla. Weird how these things work, ain’t it?"

"Very," Josiah snorted.

"Well," Sulla said, "it’s been so nice chattin’ with y’all, but I have someone else to torture. With Alec an’ George out roundin’ up the rest of your friends, I’m sort of on my own here... not that you’ll be able to take advantage of it. Now, I suggest, Mr. Dunne, you begin your confession to the Padre here. Ain’t confession one of the last rites? I’m not familiar with Catholicism, myself..." Sulla’s voice trailed off and ended altogether, leaving J.D. and Josiah alone in the darkness.

"Son, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, you understand?" Josiah asked.

"I... I know," J.D. replied, coughing. His voice sounded strained with more than just exhaustion and dehydration- the boy had been crying, Josiah realized. "But... I gotta tell it. I haveta tell ya everythin’, Josiah... I can’t keep it inside anymore."

"Speak on then, Brother Dunne," Josiah reassured the younger man. "I’m here for ya."

CHAPTER EIGHT

J.D. stared into the blackness and shivered, wishing for even a fraction of the unbearable light and heat that had assailed him earlier. He could sense Josiah’s presence in the darkness even when the preacher didn’t speak, a comforting thing that J.D. drew strength from.

And, good Lord, he needed his strength.

"Preacher," he began, using his playful nickname for the older man, "you remember when you n’ everyone else came lookin’ for me an’ Ezra that day we were supposed to be back from Silver Creek?"

"Clear as crystal, J.D.," Josiah rumbled.

The younger man took a couple shaky breaths. "Remember how me an’ Ezra were waitin’ outside that burning house, with Ezra all bundled up in quilts and the horses nearby?"
"Yes, J.D., I do."

Fear clutched at J.D.’s throat and wormed its way down to his gut. He didn’t want to remember this- he’d spent so long trying not to think or dream about what happened... what lived in that house.

"I suppose you’ll take me in now? For all of that." She waved toward the kitchen, as if J.D. needed clarification.

"I’d rather just kill you," J.D. grated, feeling sick. He glanced at the lamp near Ma Hansen’s elbow.

Tattoos...

"Why?" he managed to ask.

"Oh, this?" Ma Hansen reached out and touched a lampshade, watching dispassionately as J.D.’s body heaved helplessly in revulsion. "Indians, when they kill a buffalo, they use everythin’. No waste for them, young man. Skin’s used for clothes an’ tents, bones for tools an’ food... Same thing here. No different."

"Those are buffalo!" J.D. rasped.

"An’ men are a dime a dozen today," Ma Hansen murmured. "’Least a man who dies when John shoots him... shot him," she amended darkly, "dies a useful death, ‘stead of in some gunfight, where he’ll just git buried an’ left to rot." She saw the horror on J.D.’s face and said severely, as if lecturing a small boy who just couldn’t understand, "Oh, we doesn’t eat people, young man- we ain’t barbarians. The watchdogs here do that for us, but there’s all kinds of useful things you can get from a person- soap, candle wax, oil, leather..."

"J.D.?" Josiah’s question cut through layers of memory, jerking J.D. back to the present with an almost physical force. "J.D, you okay?" Josiah asked again, and J.D. heard worry in the preacher’s voice.

"Y-yeah," J.D. rasped, licking his lips. "I... oh, God, Josiah... there ain’t a good way to say it."

"Take your time," Josiah said encouragingly. "If you don’t wanta talk about it, why, that’s fine too. Confession is good for the soul, though, an’ I think it’d be better for you to tell me about what you’ve got on your mind rather than let them bastards out there break ya over it."

"You swear not to tell Ez?" J.D. asked, unable to bear the thought of Ezra finding out from anyone else what J.D. had so painstakingly kept fr. J.D. bitterly envied Ezra, who’d spent much of their captivity either unconscious or hallucinating from pain, shock, and dehydration. He hadn’t yet told the gambler what happened and Ezra hadn’t seemed inclined to ask; part of J.D. fervently hoped that Ezra would never ask him about the events that had transpired, but another part of him just wanted to tell someone, anyone about what happened to him... what had almost happened to him.

That thought conjured up memories of the last few minutes he and Ezra had spent in that chamber of horrors, he confronting a bleeding but unbroken Ma Hansen and trying not to throw up at each word she spoke, trying not to gag on the stench of burning flesh that issued from her kitchen.

"You swear not to tell Ez?" J.D. asked, unable to bear the thought of Ezra finding out from anyone else what J.D. had so painstakingly kept from him- Standish had given J.D. his trust in asking J.D. not to tell anyone about the memories he’d inadvertently uncovered during the gambler’s long hours of hallucination in Ma Hansen’s cellar. J.D. feared that if Ezra found out he’d told part of the tale he would have told other more confidential parts... No, J.D. decided. He couldn’t live with that.

"On the grave of my sainted mother," Josiah reassured. "Bein’ a priest for most of your life means you get used to keepin’ secrets."

"Okay," J.D. whispered and, taking a deep breath, began his story. He started from the beginning, with him and Ezra being ambushed on the way home from Silver Creek by John and Ma Hansen. He told about waking up trapped in a tiny underground box with Ezra, both of them shot but the gambler incapacitated from blood loss and heat exhaustion, with J.D. their only hope for survival; J.D. didn’t even boast about his solution to getting them out of that hole, only stumbled over the painful details of how he had to crawl all over Ezra and nearly suffocate him to open the hatch.

The next part got even worse.

"God, Josiah," J.D. whispered. "I... I barely kept my head on my shoulders. All I wanted t’ do was just start screamin’. I... I remembered what you all taught me though," he said softly, "an’ I made myself stay calm. I got myself some weapons by unscrewing the legs from a side table next to a sofa. There was this weird lamp on top of it, with this strange lampshade..." J.D. swallowed and tried not to think about that, forcing himself to continue on with his narration. "I heard noises in the kitchen..."

His will buckled as his mind raced forward to the events that happened just after he had hidden himself behind that door, waiting for the moment to strike. "I... I don’t think I can go on, Josiah," J.D. moaned, closing his eyes.

"You’re doin’ fine son," Josiah told him, his voice kind. "Just keep goin’ like you’re goin’- you’ll be okay."

J.D. coughed and his mouth worked soundlessly as he tried to find his voice. He did find it, eventually, and began to speak again, his voice going flat and remote as he went with the memory of those long, dark minutes.

J.D. exploded out of the door, wrenching it open with his right hand and shouting like a madman. The two figures in the perfectly domestic kitchen froze. Ma Hansen, her bulk enshrouded in a frilled pink apron had a butcher’s knife in her hand, seemed torn between whether to throw it or not. John’s forearm came close to touching the pot he stirred with a long-handled wooden spoon. The two looked to be on the verge of collapsing from shock.

And J.D. himself almost fell over, half-drowned in the nauseating flood of the smell of cooking and burnt flesh. Unconsciousness clawed at him, tried desperately to claim him, and a large part of J.D. wanted to sink into that welcoming oblivion. Even as he considered it, though, J.D. knew what waited for him on the other end of that temporary darkness and he pulled himself back to the here-and-now.

Reflexively threw the one chair leg, his whole world having become just him and Ma Hansen’s face, and the distance between the two. Even as the wooden missile hurtled through the air to connect with the stunned woman’s nose and sent her crashing to the floor, J.D. twisted and reached behind him for the second chair leg and threw it at John, who had raised his hands in mute surrender. This time, the weapon cracked its victim across the neck; J.D. heard the dull crunching of something either snapping or being crushed.

John fell, too, clutching his throat and gasping.

Breathing hard, the deadly calm having fled him for good, J.D. slumped back against the wall and slid down it to land in a heap on the floor. The taste of the air around him sickened him, but he forced deep breaths into his lungs, fighting down the heaves that threatened to pitch his stomach back up his throat..

"They were cookin’ people, Josiah!" J.D. husked. "I could smell ‘em... boiling like they were meat for a stew or somethin’... Oh, God..." The young man felt bile rising in his throat and resolutely fought it back. "I just turned back around and got Ezra. I just wanted to get the hell out of there."

Josiah hadn’t said a word since J.D. started his recitation, other than the one time he’d encouraged the younger man to keep going- now, the preacher thought ruefully, he wished he had let J.D. just stay silent. Cooking people? He felt sick at the thought and tried not to dwell on it as he became acutely aware of J.D.’s silence.

"So far I don’t see any guilt on your part, Brother Dunne," Josiah managed to say.

"I ain’t gotten to that part yet," J.D. whispered. "Somehow I managed to get Ezra outta that goddamned box an’ I just wanted to get the hell outta there. I had just gotten Ezra turned around when I saw her... Ma Hansen standin’ there in the doorway. I ain’t never, ever wanted t’ kill someone before, but when I saw here there, all’s I could think of was findin’ a way to kill her."

"Anyone would have thought that, J.D.," Josiah pointed out gently. "Hell, you know Chris or Vin would’ve done it right off. I probably would have."

"You don’t understand," J.D. cried. "I woulda killed her right there, if I didn’t have to hold up Ezra, an’ I told her that I’d just as soon kill her an’ not bother takin’ her in like a proper sheriff woulda done."

"So you’re worried that you killed her without giving her a fair trial," Josiah interjected.

"I thought about that for a while," J.D. admitted, "but then I started to thinkin’... I burned the house down, Josiah. That’s why the house was burnin’ when you came for us. I splashed kerosene all around the place an’ set it on fire... with her in it.

"And I saw her sittin’ in the parlor, just like she was seein’ visitors on a Sunday. That was the last I saw of her when the flames got too hot for me an’ I had to leave."

"J.D.," Josiah began, unsure as to how he would be able to comfort the younger man, "considerin’ what she did, I don’t see any fault of yours in doin’ what you did. Truly I don’t. I ever tell you the story of Tantalus?"

"No..."

"Tantalus was a man favored by the gods of ancient Greece. He was rich, powerful, had everything a man could want- and above all, Zeus had once invited him to dine amongst the gods on Olympus. You’d figure that Tantalus woulda been grateful, but I guess maybe he was a mite jealous of the fact that, honored as he was, he still weren’t no god. So one day, to test Zeus’s omnipotence, Tantalus invited him and the gods to a banquet at which Tantalus’ son, Pelops, was the unfortunate main course.

"Zeus discovered the trick, of course, bein’ the king of the gods an’ all, and condemned Tantalus to an eternity of reaching for food and drink that he could never obtain. He would bend over a sweet, flowing stream only to have it dry just before his lips touched the water; he would reach for a ripe apple on an overhanging tree, but a breeze would push that apple just out of reach of his grasping fingers. That’s where we get the word ‘tantalize’ from, you know. Well, that ain’t the point... the point is that sinners get their just punishment, J.D. That woman got what was coming to her, and you delivered it. There ain’t no sin in that."

"That’s a nice story," J.D. said weakly after it became apparent that Josiah was finished. "But there’s somethin’ else..."

"What’s that, John Dunne?"

"I told ya that I left when the flames got too hot," J.D. whispered, closing his eyes as the magnitude of his failure set in. "We left right off the next mornin’... I didn’t even think of checkin’ for a body, I wanted t’ get outta there so bad. So for all I know, she could still be alive... be out there..." His voice shut off under the pressure of a month’s worth of sobs, and J.D. couldn’t keep the tears from coming to his eyes.

CHAPTER NINE

"I told ya that I left when the flames got too hot," the young man whispered, and Jacob Sulla felt his heart race with anticipation as the boy drew a shaky breath to admit just how bady he had failed. "We left right off the next mornin’... I didn’t even think of checkin’ for a body, I wanted t’ get outta there so bad. So for all I know, she could still be alive... be out there..."

Sulla exulted when he heard the first tremulous, manfully-suppressed sobs beginning. He couldn’t see the boy in the darkness of the room that he kept them in, but in his mind’s eye he saw young John Dunne’s pale shoulders, clad in torn and dirty cloth, start to shake; dimly, dimly he could hear the rattling of shackles as tears of guilt took over the young man’s frame.

"God, Josiah," the young man gasped. "What if she’s out there? What if she’s... what if she’s doin’ that all over again? I... I can’t live with that, Josiah, I just can’t!"

"Well, you won’t have to worry about that," broke in Sulla from his corner. He grinned to himself at the sudden cessation of sound from Dunne.

"He won’t have to worry about what?" demanded Sanchez. Sulla grudgingly raised his level of respect for the large man- although dry from thirst, Sanchez’s voice remained strong and carrying and not in the least bit intimidated by his unseen foe.

"Oh, he won’t have to worry about living with not knowing whether or not Mrs. Hansen lived to kill another day," Sulla replied, allowing his voice to become mocking. "You see, he’ll get to die not knowing whether or not Mrs. Hansen lived to kill another day." He leaned back on his heels, a satisfied smile creeping across his lips at the cry of anguish that tore from Dunne’s lips.

"You bastard," Sanchez hissed, the grating voice low and filled with a menace that, were the man not shackled securely, would have made Sulla shake with fear. "Leave him the hell alone," the big man ordered.

"It’s not a good idea to give orders you can’t back up," Sulla retorted. "Now, if you two promise t’ be good, why, maybe you can see one of your other buddies. I’m sure he’d like the chance to spill his guts to ya, before I can."

"Who- who’s he talkin’ about, Josiah?" J.D. asked.

"Just the high-and-goddamned-mighty Chris Larabee," Sulla told the younger man.

"The boy wasn’t talkin’ to you," Sanchez grated. Sulla laughed.

"Really now, Mr. Sanchez," Sulla snickered, "for a man of Chris Larabee’s vaunted reputation, he broke awful easy. Like I said, keep it quiet an’ maybe y’all can see him." With that, Sulla pressed the small trigger that would open a hatch leading to a tunnel that would disgorge him onto the first floor of the nondescript house he’d taken over on the outskirts of Delphi.

He crawled through the tunnel and finally got the cellar door open, forcing it upward with a shaky arm. George Fairman, who stood at a mirror on the other side of the room, saw Sulla struggling to open the hatch and strolled over, casually offering an arm to him.

Sulla frowned but accepted the offered assistance. "Thank you, George," he muttered, not looking at the taller man.

"Nothing at all, I assure you," Fairman returned, brushing a hand back through his finely-trimmed gray hair. "Just wanted to know when you wanted myself and Alexander to ride out."

"You didn’t bring Wilmington in?" Sulla demanded, scowling.

"Hmmm... yes, Wilmington," Fairman mused as if the man were an acquaintance he’d not thought of in a while, "Alexander was already on his way to abduct J.D. Dunne and I’m fairly sure Wilmington, when we find him, will be fairly easy to apprehend. He was bleeding quite profusely, last I saw him."

"Dammit, George!" Sulla exploded, his brown eyes wild with fury. "I wanted all three of them back with us first thing and you do this?"

"I would not take that tone with the man who taught you to ‘speak all fancy n’ purty-like’," Fairman said coldly. "Assisting you in impersonating your dead brother has been a tribulation in and of itself, and I have no intention of rendering my travail any more torturous by tolerating such abuse from you. Regardless of how we obtain him, Wilmington will make his way back to your little house of horrors along with Standish and Jackson. Really, I think it might actually work better this way- we know that Standish and Jackson will almost certainly be in town."

"Do you know if Alec checked his backtrail?" Sulla asked, not wanting to discuss how indebted he was to Fairman for helping him pass as his college-educated, successful younger brother. "He did arrive quite swiftly with Mr. Dunne."

"Am I Alexander’s keeper?" asked Fairman sarcastically. "You will have to take that up with him."

"So where is Alec, then?"

"Out by the livery, I’d imagine. Either that or getting drunk."

"Christ, Fairman!" Sulla shouted, no longer able to restrain his fury. "What if Tanner followed him? The man can track, goddammit!"

"You want him to suffer, Jacob," Fairman replied, his green eyes darkening with exasperation. "He will suffer enough by the time this is through, and why not have him come straight to Delphi? Drag the torture out too long and it’s not as much fun."

"Go find Tolliver," Sulla ground out. "Find him now, then find Wilmington, Standish, and Jackson. I’m the one who got you out of Yuma, Fairman. Don’t forget that."

"I am not planning on it," Fairman retorted, his tone dry. "Until later, employer mine." With that, the taller man tipped an imaginary hat and wandered out, shutting the door behind him and leaving Jacob Sulla alone. Sulla watched him go, a fierce scowl twisting across his lips. The outlaw stood for a moment, just staring, before he stalked out the back door and headed for the shack where he kept Chris Larabee.

Dragging out the torture too long did diminish some of the fun, he reflected- but then, it still made so many enjoyable moments. He opened the door hidden in a small recessed corner of the shack, set back carefully so that the tormented prisoner couldn’t see his entry if he still had the courage to open his eyes after the first few times, or the strength after spending hours in such unrelenting heat.

"Christopher," Sulla whispered, resuming the cultured accents of his poor, dead younger brother- just doing so conjured up a mental picture of Vin Tanner’s hated face and brought fury bubbling to the surface. "Christopher," Sulla repeated at hearing his prisoner groan. "We’re going to leave soon and I’m taking you somewhere else." He paused, waiting for an answering moan or curse- he got nothing. Vaguely disappointed at underestimating Larabee’s stoicism, Sulla continued.

"Confession they say, is good for the soul. Would you like confession, Christopher?"

Silence, and then a broken, whispered, "Y-yesss..."

Vin got Ezra out of his bedroll well before the sun could even get a decent start on rising. He had let the gambler sleep, himself being unable to chase away the thousands of thoughts that plagued his mind. Tanner needed the darkness, the solitude of keeping watch, to sort out those feelings and try to force them to the back of his awareness while he dealt with the immediate danger.

Still... when the immediate danger and the thought were one and the same...

For the first time in Vin’s memory, Ezra didn’t give vent to any complaints. Instead, the gambler soundlessly rolled out of his blankets and bounded to his feet. With a silent economy that Vin reluctantly admired- and certainly did not expect- Standish broke down camp and went to check the horses.

Still, the gambler couldn’t resist interjecting one comment. As he passed by Vin on his way to where they’d picketed the horses, Standish paused to whisper, "You know, Mr. Tanner, you should not become too used to this sort of behavior from me."

Tanner managed to crack a grin. "Wasn’t expectin’ it, Ez," he told Standish, who favored Vin with a grin of his own and continued on his way.

Nathan still bent over Buck’s prone body and Vin went over to see how the gunfighter fared. He scrutinized Jackson’s face closely, seeing worry and exhaustion there- Vin felt guilty for forcing first a night of watching Buck and now a day’s hard ride on the healer without giving him a break. As if reading Vin’s mind, Nathan looked up from Buck’s still form and offered the tracker a slight smile.

"I’ll be okay, Vin," the healer assured him. "If’n we can get Buck back to town, I think he’s got a good shot at pullin’ through." Vin knew those last words were meant for him, but could not keep down the new flood of guilt that Jackson’s earlier reassurance had stemmed.

"God, Nathan," Vin whispered, staring at Buck’s pale face and praying that the man’s face had not gone any whiter since last night, "if’n..."

"No ‘ifs’," Nathan interrupted before Vin could get going. "We ain’t got the time for ‘em, Vin. Chris, J.D., Josiah... they ain’t got the time for ‘em, either." He gave Vin a meaningful look and then directed his eyes past the tracker to rest on the horizon, just past which Delphi waited. "We’ll bring ‘em back, Vin, but we got to go together, an’ we got to have you with us not back in the past."

"Thanks, Nathan," Vin whispered. "Did an awful good job of not thinkin’ about all’a that yesterday... reckon all it takes is a good night’s stewin’ t’ bring everything t’ the surface, huh?"

"It does, Vin," Nathan agreed and then frowned at considering the sharpshooter’s words. "You get any sleep last night?" he demanded. Apology flickered briefly in Vin’s eyes and the healer scowled. "You won’t be any good t’ yourself fallin’ outta your saddle. When we get back t’ town, you’re sleepin’ until I can get Buck taken care of."

"Yes, sir," Vin muttered, a sad smile creasing his lips as he turned away to answer Ezra’s announcement that the horses were ready. He mounted up and kept watch while Ezra and Nathan picked up an unconscious Wilmington and wrestled him up onto the big gray then secured Wilmington to the saddle. Guilt jolted through Tanner as he thought about what they were about to do- make an injured man run back to town, maybe make his injuries worse... He started to voice a protest, to say they might as well take it slow, but Ezra spoke before he could.

"We might as well do this, Mr. Tanner," the gambler said. "As Mr. Jackson said at some point last night, no good decisions can be made in any of this."

"You’re right, Ez," Vin whispered, looking away to study the eastern horizon.

"Mr. Jackson is right," Ezra corrected as he handed Nathan the lead to Buck’s horse and mounted up in one fluid motion. "Now I suggest that you also follow some more of Mr.
Jackson’s excellent advice and leave the past behind you for the time being. There will be time to deal with it later- but not now."

Standish watched Tanner’s eyes harden and the apology and guilt drain away. Vin nodded and reached down to release his rifle from the saddle holster. He checked the chamber and draped the rifle low across his hip, then scanned the horizon for any sign of life. "You ready t’ go then, Ez?" he asked.

"More than ready," Ezra said, spurring his horse forward. "Shall you take point for yourself, while I watch the rear?"

"Yup." Vin urged Peso to the front, and the horse picked up a loose, flowing lope. He heard Nathan, Buck, and Ezra fall into step behind him and he automatically catalogued the sound of three horses cantering over hard-packed ground. As the sun rose, the guilt and memories that had gnawed at him faded away in the light of dawn, but Vin took no comfort in the coldness of keeping watch over his friends.

The guilt and memories would only return at night.

CHAPTER TEN

As it turned out, staying in the present turned out to be much more difficult than Vin would have supposed.

They made quick time across the empty landscape, but for Vin the ride seemed to last ten lifetimes. His heart would leap at every sound or movement, convulsing even as a rabbit would dart across their path or a hawk cry and dive to the earth in the distance. Peso picked up on his rider’s nervousness, tossing his head and fighting the bit and spooking at whatever Vin did.
Desperately, Vin strove to remain calm and composed- remembering that Buck and Nathan needed a guard instead of a half-hysterical lookout helped somewhat, but Vin still couldn’t shake the slithery feeling he got between his shoulder blades, the sensation he got when he felt unseen eyes at his back, an unseen rifle trained for a headshot.

Which brought back thoughts of Eli Joe and the bullet that had gone just wide of his head that day in the street. Chris had saved his life- twice, as it turned out- that day, and might have condemned him as well, but Vin couldn’t fault him for that.

And goddammit, he couldn’t think about these things!

Plenty of time to think about them when Nathan carted him off to bed- plenty of time to rehearse that nightmarish day in his dreams. Plenty of time to think about them in hell- plenty of time to wonder if maybe God wasn’t laughing at him, if this wasn’t his penance for--

TANNER! he shouted at himself, shaking his head to clear the offending thoughts from it.

With a start, he realized that they had almost made the town limits and would be at Nathan’s in under a half hour. He risked a glance backward at Buck, felt his heart jolt with relief at seeing the gunslinger still in the saddle although he remained deathly pale and unconscious. Almost automatically, he did a head count- Nathan still lead Buck’s horse along at a quick pace, alternating his gaze between the injured man next to him and the trail before him.

Ezra meanwhile had gone above and beyond the call of duty, Vin realized, doubling back to cover their trail as best he could. The sides of Ezra’s horse heaved visibly and a fresh white coat of lathered sweat covered the creature’s chestnut neck. Dust transformed Ezra’s forest-green jacket into a half-hearted olive color, stained his face, and grayed his hat.

Seeing Vin’s scrutiny, Ezra winced. "Truly, this is the height of barbarity and unsophistication," he called. "I believe that I have destroyed my clothing in record time... We’ve been on this Godforsaken trail for the past hour and a half and already..." The complaint trailed off as its maker choked on a dust cloud that went up both his mouth and nose simultaneously.

"Thanks, Ez," Vin told the gambler, once Standish’s coughing ground to a halt.

"Nothin’ at all, I assure you," Ezra muttered, swiping half-heartedly and ineffectually at the dust covering his sleeve. "What else are friends for?"

Vin heard the sarcasm in Ezra’s voice and almost laughed, but the words themselves caught at him and demanded attention.

"What else are friends for?"

Hell.

"What else are friends for?"

Vin, being a novice at this sort of thing, didn’t know exactly, but he did know that he’d keep his friends alive, even if it meant his own death. Dying didn’t frighten him much- the thought of his death being a public spectacle in Tascosa inspired more disgust than fear- but the thought of his friends dying...

No. It wasn’t even an option. Vin’s grip around the rifle tightened.

Ezra had looked after their backtrail, but Vin knew Buck would not have checked his and that Wilmington would not have been able to do so. How the gunfighter had managed to find their camp, Vin didn’t know, but he knew that anyone who could read sign with any amount of skill could trace a wounded man’s stumbling, uncovered path across the fairly uniform terrain. Tanner couldn’t remember Tolliver or Fairman ever being adept at tracking- out of the two of them, he would pick Tolliver as the most likely to go on the hunt.

Not that Fairman wasn’t dangerous. Anyone who had seen the dapper, refined face and written him down as nothing more than a two-bit cardshark- probably what those unfortunate people in the wagon train had done, as many had done before them- found out their mistake almost immediately. Vin remembered the rumors that had sprung up shortly after Tolliver and Fairman’s capture- Fairman knew how to torture the mind, to break a person’s soul into a thousand pieces without any bloodshed whatsoever.

Thinking that a bastard like Fairman would be responsible for this...

In its own strange way, it helped.

Vin settled a little then and urged Peso on a little faster as the town came up even closer. He heard the quickening beats of the three horses behind him but didn’t risk a look back to check on them- Nathan would shout, he hoped, if something was wrong. He stayed focused on the hoofbeats, allowing them to seep into his awareness and become as familiar to him as his own heartbeat- if a mouse ran across the path behind him, Vin felt, he would know about it.

Just before reaching the border of the town, Vin called a halt. Three blowing horses pulled up next to him, their riders hardly in much better shape. He tried not to see Buck slump over his horse’s neck, the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest, the fine sheen of sweat that covered pasty skin.

"We’re gonna go in the back way," Vin said briefly. "Got to sneak Buck into town an’ not get ourselves any recognition- don’t want anyone givin’ away the fact that we got an injured man." Vin checked the sun and saw with satisfaction that it had not yet reached noon. "Nathan, you think we could move him somewheres in the middle of the night?"

"Mary’s place?" Nathan asked, picking up on Vin’s line of thought.

"If I may interject," Ezra rasped, his voice rough with grit. "It seems that whoever is plotting against ourselves and Mr. Tanner is familiar enough with him to know how to, ah, exploit his weaknesses; therefore, it’s logical to assume that they would also be aware of Ms. Travis’ familiarity with our group and would watch her accordingly."

"There’s the boardin’ house," Nathan said doubtfully, but shook his head even as the words formed, "or the back of Mrs. Potter’s store- she has that old storeroom in the rear of her building." He glanced at Vin, seeing the deeply unhappy expression cross his friend’s face. "It’s the best we can do for now," he pointed out. "Ain’t no way Buck can stay in the infirmary without a guard. Like Ezra says, Mary’s out..."

"He’d have to be guarded anywhere," Vin muttered. "An’ people would notice if Mary was hangin’ around Mrs. Potter’s store all the time."

"No good choices, Vin," Nathan reminded the younger man.

"Mary’s then," Vin said decisively. "It’s close to the infirmary an’ Mary can spend time there without people wonderin’ about it. That is," he added, "if’n ya think she can still take care o’ Bucklin."

"Ride couldn’tve made him much worse off than he already was," Nathan sighed. "The longer we spend out here the worse it’s gonna be for him with fever settin’ in."

"Okay then," Vin said, wheeling his horse to head around the backside of the town. "Let’s go."
Vin found himself giving thanks for the heat, which had kept most of Four Corner’s citizens inside instead of out in the streets. He pulled Peso up at the rear of Nathan’s infirmary and dismounted just in time to help Nathan catch Buck’s body, which had begun to limply slide out of the saddle. Wilmington’s dead weight sagged in Vin’s arms.

Dead weight...

Nathan saw the fear and remorse cross Vin’s face and said firmly, "He’ll be okay, Vin. Once I can get him tended to... he’ll be okay." The healer wished he could give Vin more than empty reassurance, but was powerless to do so. "For now just help me get him upstairs and then get yourself to sleep. Ezra can take care of the horses."

"Yes, Ezra can take care of the horses," Standish mimicked sarcastically, swinging down from his horse and taking a couple more swipes at his jacket. "The question is, does Ezra want to take care of the horses." He saw the looks directed at him by the other two men and shrugged. "Of course, Ezra wants to take care of the horses," he sighed as he collected Nathan’s and Vin’s mounts, stringing them alongside his own.

Vin and Nathan watched him go for a moment before Nathan switched his grip on Buck to hold him under both arms and instructed Vin to grab Buck by the ankles. Between the two of them, they managed to get Buck’s prone- and heavy- form up the stairs, through the infirmary door, and finally into bed.

Without looking up from his preparations, Nathan commanded Vin to go to bed and Tanner wordlessly complied, pulling his coat off and dropping it on the cot next to Buck’s.

"And when I say ‘bed’, I mean ‘sleep,’" Nathan added as he began boiling water. He saw Vin’s mouth open in either a question or an outright protest and said, "No, to whatever it is."

"Sure you don’t need help?" Vin asked, despite his body’s treacherous cries for rest.

"Yes."

"Just askin’..." Vin’s eyelids got heavy as the past day caught up with him and the full weight of J.D.’s disappearance, Buck’s reappearance, Sulla’s note, Vin’s own past, his own mistakes, Chris, Josiah, Tolliver, and Fairman crashed down on him.

And together, they constituted a damn heavy weight. By himself, it was just too damn much to carry and Vin really didn’t want to carry it anyway. He’d give anything to set it down for a bit, to rest, to sleep, to let go... to just let go...

Before he knew it, Vin drifted off to sleep and- unexpectedly- did not dream.

Nathan kept an eye on the tracker while he began grinding herbs together with a mortar and pestle, and was relieved when the tense, slight form relaxed into slumber complete with even breaths that reassured the healer. He realized the full depth of Vin’s exhaustion when the shrieking of the kettle failed to rouse him- it disturbed Jackson for a moment, but he knew that when the body and soul needed rest, both together would find a way to get it.

And Lord did Vin Tanner ever need that rest, body as well as soul.

Jackson heard soft footfalls outside the door and the hand holding the pestle quickly dropped the tool in favor of the gun by his right elbow. An equally furtive knock and a familiar, whispered ‘Standish’ got Nathan out of the chair and moving to the locked door. Cautiously he unlocked and opened it, only releasing a taut breath when Ezra stepped through alone- still dusty but with the fresh addition of straw clinging to the brim of his hat.

"Like your headgear," Nathan said solemnly, gesturing to Ezra’s hat. The gambler looked at him askance for a heartbeat only before the mask of cool composure came over his face once more.
"Ah, yes... it appears that dried grasses are quite the rage back East," Standish remarked as he took his hat off and beat it on his leg; dust rose in copious clouds and Ezra sneezed. After the spell passed, he glanced at the two still forms on two cots. "Quite the picture they make, don’t they?" he asked.

Nathan snorted. "Kinda surprised Vin went out without a fight. The second he set his head on that pillow he was off."

"Indeed?" Ezra asked. "I suppose staying up late at night fearing for one’s life and the lives of others is mentally draining and physically taxing."

"Speakin’ of physically taxing," Nathan said, "why don’t you get yourself cleaned up?"
Incredibly, Standish shifted around and refused to meet Jackson’s gaze as he gave his answer. "Having neglected to take my watch last night," Ezra said stiffly, "I believe I would be best served by taking mine right now. ‘Better late than never’, I think the proverb says."

"Sure, Ezra," Nathan replied, pretending not to notice as the gambler rechecked his derringer and various shoulder rigs then moved to settle himself in a chair next to Vin and positioned himself to face the door. "Whatever you say."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"How ‘bout me gettin’ outta these chains an’ makin’ you bleed?"

Such defiance seemed such a long way away, like he had said the words a year ago.

Everything had been so bright and so hot for so long that Chris had eventually lost the ability to distinguish between the light that seared his eyes even through shut lids and the heat that seemed to roast him from the inside out. Instead, both blended together into one sharp-edged blanket of pain.

The delirium brought on by too much heat and not enough water had slowly begun to rob Chris of any coherent thought at all; memories of Sarah and Adam and Ella and the faces of the men he’d killed mixed together into a nightmarish stew stirred by fever, heat, and pain. Sometimes he saw men he’d killed in the war, sometimes men he’d killed after the fire had left him alone and as close to broken as a man like Chris Larabee was ever likely to get.

He could see their graves, every one of them. Could see the fresh earth over two newly-planted headstones with dozens of men standing around them and a woman in a pitch-black dress with long brown hair, gloating behind her veil.

Chris wanted to shout, to run at them, to shoot them, to send them scattering and so dispel this nightmare, but he couldn’t do anything, chained as he was. His wrists and ankles had almost numbed, finally, so now the occasional stabs of pain from the rough iron edges rubbing against--

"Christopher..."

The hated voice had returned, but Chris couldn’t do anything. Didn’t want to do anything. From somewhere came a vicious voice that told him to do something, commanded him to lash out at the voice, to destroy it at once or, failing that, destroy it at some later time. Yet... his entire body hurt and burned with an unrelenting fire, pleading with him to stay still and small, telling him that if he didn’t move his tormentor would go away.

He groaned, unsure of what to do- and, he realized with a sickening lurch, afraid of what would happen if he didn’t do anything.

The real Chris Larabee wouldn’t lie here moanin’ like a dyin’ horse, the fierce voice reprimanded.

Stay still, his body cried. Please, just stay still a little longer... don’t move... he’ll go away...

"Christopher," the voice repeated in a kindly, lecturing tone, "we’re going to leave soon and I’m taking you somewhere else."

A strange, awkward pause, then, as if the man were waiting for something. The fierce voice and his body both conspired to keep Chris silent.

"Confession they say, is good for the soul," that hated voice continued, sounding somewhat disappointed in the lack of response. "Would you like confession, Christopher?"

Confession?

Chris’s mind dragged over that word. He’d never gone to confession, not being Catholic himself, so why was he going? He remembered vaguely that confession was one of the last rites in the Catholic faith.

Was he dying?

But if he wasn’t Catholic... what religion was he? Chris tried to remember. Was confession reserved strictly for Catholics, or could non-Catholics get confession too? Did his religion allow him to have confession, whatever that religion was? He couldn’t remember that either.

Still, for the past several years he hadn’t practiced much of any kind of religion at all- that much, at least, he knew. The only religion he could remember involved two crossed with names crudely marked on them in black paint and, later on, wine of the non-communion sort. He had long ago figured on dying without the luxury of a cross to mark the fact that Chris Larabee had once existed, counted on going to the next world with more than enough sin to see him through six eternities in Hell.

Why the hell did he need confession? He’d talk the priest’s ear off.

But still... Delirium regained its hold on Chris, mixed this time with a desperation to find comfort- any kind of comfort in anything, when there was so little of it to be had in this prison.

"Y-yesss..."

"There then," the voice said, sounding satisfied. "That wasn’t so hard, was it? I have to say you’re nowhere near as tough as I thought you was, Larabee." A rough accent twisted the words and for a moment Chris thought that there were two people in the room.

The harsh dragging of chains across his body jerked him from such thoughts, and Chris had to suppress a gasp of relief as he felt the hot weight of the shackles on his ankles and wrists disappear. Relief ended as his body collapsed and his knees hit the ground with a sickening jolt.

"Clumsy me!" the voice exclaimed, unrepentant as the hands belonging to it wrapped a cloth tightly around Chris’s eyes, so tightly that Larabee cried softly at the pressure of the material against chapped and mistreated skin. "Let’s go... don’t want you croakin’ before you get the chance t’ unburden your soul to your preacher-friend." Two strong arms slithered under his armpits and encircled his chest.

Chris felt a stab of fury at being unable to break free from such an ineffective grip, but could do no more than grunt as the hot shifting of a body against him began to move and his boots bounced over rough stones.

He heard the creak of a door opening on rusty hinges, a curse as it swung back and the heavy clunk of a boot catching it just before it slammed shut. That same door bounced off his body as the voice pulled him through the door and into some place very dark and inexplicably, impossibly, horribly cold.

Frigid air washed over him in a wave of agony and his mind shocked itself almost back to clarity as if he’d been dropped in ice-cold water. He gasped with the suddeness of it, his teeth hurting as icy air hurtled between his lips, and the voice laughed cruelly at his pain.

He was vaguely aware that he was being hauled him down a dirt hallway- with his blindfolded eyes firmly shut, he couldn’t see, but the lack of a breeze or natural heat against his skin led him to guess they remained inside. It took almost all of his reserves to keep his mind together in order to make that deduction when so much of him, sun-mad and nearly gone with the endless torture of heat and light, wanted nothing more than to curl up in darkness and be done with everything.
Through the haze of delirium and pain, Chris felt the heaving of a body at his back and hear muttered curses directed at Larabee’s weight, heritage, mother, and weakness.

"Ain’t never figured you for a quitter, Larabee... Well, hell... not like it’s gonna matter much longer," the voice muttered, its chest rumbling against Chris’s left ear. "Might as well drag this out a little more an’ wait for Tanner t’ get here..."

Chris tensed at hearing Vin’s name- so, the bastard was out for Vin, he thought.

Huh... usually it’s the other way around...

Larabee thought about giggling at that, but breathing had become difficult enough with those arms wrapped around him and rubbing against seared and painful skin. The impulse passed, and the voice kept dragging Chris along, stumbling every now and then, the sharp scufflings of boots punctuated by more curses. After an eternity of being hauled down that dark hallway, another door creaked open with its attendant awkward maneuvering of Chris’s body on the part of the voice.

Predicatably, of course, the voice fastened a new set of shackles around Chris’s wrists and ankles. He tried to protest the movement, lashing out on raw instinct alone, but the kick was weak and missed its target completely, as indicated by the soft and mocking laughter.

"Oh, Christopher... Ella’s told me all about you," the voice purred, barely above a whisper.
Ella? The face of the woman with the brown hair swam up from the depths and Chris felt a surge of hatred rush into him at the name. With some of his old spirit, Chris thought that if he had the moisture in his mouth, he’d spit in the voice’s face.

"You’re becoming agitated," the voice observed with the same false kindness. "I’ll leave you now... might as well spill your soul to your preacher-friend before it’s too late for you. Not that it already isn’t mind you, but..." The voice trailed off. "Be that as it may, I’ll see y’all later."

Chris heard a faint clinking and a muted grating, then silence. Until...

"Chris?" The broken, bleeding whisper trickled through the air.

"J.D.?"

"Yeah." A rough, smacking sound of a drying tongue running over cracked lips. "J’siah’s here, too," the young man rasped. "Sleepin’, though."

"Not anymore." The bass rumblings of Josiah Sanchez, undefeated, rolled up to Chris, washing around him like water over rocks.

"Says... I need... confession," Chris managed, wincing at the pain in his throat.

"You don’t," Josiah said. "Or, if ya need confession... it ain’t God tellin’ ya to go to it. Jake Sulla’s got us, Chris. He’s the one dragged you in here an’ the one who captured us in the first place."

Chris racked his brain for a moment, trying to figure out why the man was so familiar. "Kansas
Jake Sulla?" he croaked after fastening on the memory. "He got.. he got taken in..."

"By Vin," J.D. interrupted, the word spilling out of him despite sorrow and exhaustion. "Only that wasn’t Jake- it was his brother. Isaac ‘r somethin’. An’ now..." J.D. coughed, and Chris could hear the dryness of each violent explosion of breath, "... an’ now he’s out for revenge." Even breathless and tired, the boy managed to work in an unspoken, sarcastic, ‘of course’ to the end of his speech.

"Had me goin’ for a while too, Chris," Josiah added. "If Vin knows about this, he’s probably tearin’ himself up... seems t’ be Sulla’s plan. Ain’t God’s, that’s for sure."

"How d’ya know?" Chris asked softly.

"God ain’t nowhere near bein’ the sadistic bastard Sulla is," Josiah said flatly. "While I have to say the Good Lord has his moments... this sure ain’t one of ‘em, not to mention that God probably wouldn’t need t’ use a trap door t’ go from one place to another."

So that was the cause of the clanking and grating, Chris realized. A trickle of ease flowed into Chris at that. Not much, but having this nightmare grounded on Earth instead of in Heaven, of dealing with a man instead of spirits... Chris Larabee could do that. So could Josiah Sanchez and J.D. Dunne, even though they both sounded tired to death and dehydrated. Chris wondered what had become of the others- wondered if Vin did indeed know, or if he, Nathan, and Ezra had been captured already.

"I’m thinkin’ Vin’ll be spared most of this," Josiah grated, echoing Chris’s own, disjointed thoughts. "Seems t’ fit in with what Sulla wants to happen- have Vin’s friends suffer the way Sulla himself has. Nathan and Ezra... they’re in danger."

"So’s Buck..." Chris whispered. "If he’s still alive..."

CHAPTER TWELVE

Slowly, slowly, Buck became aware of a blessedly cool something flowing over his face. Recalling the acute, unremitting pain that had accompanied him from the trail from Eagle Bend to his half-remembered arrival at the camp his friends had pitched on the way to Delphi made him decide that this delicious something had to be part of a dream. Wilmington determined, therefore, to keep dreaming as long as possible.

His plan failed; the cool something made his skin more alive, revived him- and made him more aware of the myriad of aches and pains that wound its way around his body. Most of the agony centered itself in his shoulder, a ring of fire that sent stabbing, relentless heat circling around his chest and neck. Buck felt a gentle prodding around that area and reflexively tried to move away, only to be stopped by a firm hand and a familiar voice.

"Buck, I’m gonna haveta change this dressin’ now, an’ you’re gonna haveta stay still for it," Nathan’s voice said, breaking through the last vestiges of comforting semi-consciousness. Buck groaned but still refused to open his eyes.

"D’you remember gettin’ shot on the way home from Eagle Bend?" Nathan asked, relentless in his desire to see Buck fully back among the living. Buck scowled at the healer’s persistence.

"Sorta," Buck croaked and surprised at his own voice, wheezed out a request for water. Feeling the rim of a cup pressed against his lips, Wilmington opened his mouth and took a few grateful gulps before Nathan removed it. Restored somewhat, Buck opened his eyes at last and gave an involuntary start at looking at a ceiling which did not belong to the infirmary.

Nathan, seeing Buck’s consternation, launched on a quick explanation. "We brought ya back here from camp early yesterday morning," he told the surprised gunfighter. "It’s been a whole day you been out of it- ‘s around two in the morning now. I... Vin thought it best to move you to a back room at Mary’s place for the time being, so she can take care of you- I got to go to Delphi with him n’ Ezra t’ find the others."

"Delphi," Buck whispered, suppressing a shiver conjured by the name. "Figgered it had t’ be that..."

"How’d you know?" Nathan asked as he pressed a carbolic-soaked bandage against the gunshot wound and tied firmly in place with wrapping cloths.

Buck hissed at the pressure. "Damn, Nate!" he grated. "Warn a man next time..."

"Will do," Nathan said, grinning. "Ya know it wouldn’t make much difference, though. So how’d you know we were goin’ to Delphi anyway?"

Wilmington tried to remember, but the process of just thinking in a straight line, much less remembering the events from two days ago- two days? Had it been that long?-, was difficult. How had he known they were going to Delphi? How had he even found him? Buck shook his head, feeling cobwebs cloud over the memories he was sure he had.

"Ain’t sure," he said finally, admitting defeat. "Guess I recognized the area, maybe. I dunno... we got attacked from that general direction anyway, an’ knowin’ y’all... You were gonna come lookin’ for us soon anyway."

"J.D. got kidnapped," Nathan said softly, "by Alec Tolliver an’ George Fairman."

Two firm hands on Buck’s shoulders kept Wilmington from rising, but he struggled until pain and exhaustion forced him to lie back down. "Shit! The kid!" Buck groaned, fear for J.D. and fury at his helplessness warring in him as he thought about what could have happened to his best friend/surrogate younger brother. "God..." Buck whispered brokenly. "You’re gonna find him?" he asked, unable to keep a note of plaintiveness from his words.

"We will," Nathan said firmly, in the same voice he reserved for telling someone a patient would survive even if he had to drag the patient back from the grave kicking and screaming. "You’re stayin’ here with Mary." Nathan raised his hand as Buck started up a weak protest. "You’re stayin’ here with Mary," Nathan repeated, "an’ she’s gonna watch ya- an’ you ain’t gonna give her any trouble. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," Buck muttered. "What’s that grin for?" he asked suspciously as a mysterious smile creased Nathan’s face.

"Oh, reminds me of somethin’ another stone-stubborn fool tol’ me yesterday before we got back here an’ I made him go to sleep." The question in Buck’s eyes prompted the healer to continue. "Vin got it into his head t’ stay up all night the night you found us on the way t’ Delphi- like we need a tracker fallin’ outta his saddle."

"Yeah, well, I kept all your sorry asses safe, so’s I wouldn’t be complainin’," Vin Tanner’s voice interjected. Buck grinned at the shock and embarrassment that jolted across Nathan’s face as Tanner wandered across the room to stand at the foot of Buck’s bed and look down on him; levity passed as Buck fought back a chill at seeing two cold blue eyes fixed on him and a rifle slung over Vin’s shoulder. "How ya feelin’ Bucklin?" Vin asked, the soft concern in his voice at odds with the body language.

"Like I been shot," Buck grumbled, directing a scathing glare at the bandages swathing his shoulder. He redirected his eyes to Vin. "You goin’ hunting?" he asked, using his good hand to gesture toward Vin’s rifle.

"Uh-huh," Vin said. "Been watchin’ out atop the hotel roof," he said- at seeing the disapproving scowl on Nathan’s face, he added, "I’m takin’ turns with Ezra- he’s up there now an’ he’ll take watch until mornin’ while I," Tanner’s face creased in irritation, "get some sleep."

"Good t’ see you’re startin’ t’ get a lick o’ sense in that thick skull of yours," Nathan groused good-naturedly. "You goin’ back to the boardin’ house?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah," Vin responded, looking a bit bewildered at the question. "Just wanted t’ stop by an’ see how y’all were doin’."

"Would be doin’ a whole lot better if I could be up lookin’ for J.D.," Buck couldn’t resist saying.

"No, you’d be doin’ a whole lot worse," Nathan informed him. "We’ll find J.D., Buck, an’ the others. I’m gonna get some shut-eye now so’s Ez, Vin, an’ I can leave in the morning- we’ll find ‘em."

"We will," Tanner whispered, and Buck could hear the steel in the soft voice. "Best be goin’ now," the tracker murmured, spinning on his heel and marching out the door, closing it soundlessly behind him.

Vin escaped into the coldness of the desert pre-dawn, feeling slightly guilty at lying to Nathan but told himself the cause justified the small falsehood. Keeping to the dark recesses of alleyways and buildings, Vin moved down the street, a phantom moving amongst the shadows cast by the flickering fires that dotted the side of the main road. He made the short distance to the infirmary without detection and unseen, he slipped up the clinic’s stairs and crept into the room, eyes plying the shadows for any hidden threat.

Only the silence of an empty room greeted him; Vin turned on an oil lamp, lit a few candles, and sat down to wait. He didn’t particularly want to sit still and wait until his prey came; hunting meant leaving Ezra alone to guard both Nathan and Buck and the town on top of that.

He had that feeling again, the feeling that someone was coming. The unexpected rest of yesterday, untainted by dreams or memories alike, filled him with a bursting, directionless energy and set his senses crackling like lightning. That old instinct, the one Bud had fought so hard to engender in him, spoke as loudly to him now as it ever had.

Enemies wouldn’t wait... they would come.

Tolliver, Fairman, or both... somehow he just knew.

In the chaos of emotions that made up so much of the past two days, Vin could at least take comfort in knowing that much- his soul had bounced around like a child’s toy, spinning between the cold, reassuring distance of the fierce, independent hunter and the fear, self-loathing, and remorse of the friend who’d seen three comrades disappear and who watched over the remaining three.

Who was powerless now to do no more than watch. The hunter howled in frustration at that until a stern, endlessly critical voice whispered that, were it not for the hunter who’d tracked down the wrong man on that day so long ago, none of this would have happened.

Carefully, Vin repositioned himself by the window so he could look out of it onto the length of main street without being detected by any passersby, as well as remain facing the clinic door to catch any intruders unawares. He sat there for a while, fighting the impulse to fidget and absently running his fingers along the abbreviated barrel of his Winchester, keeping his eyes trained loosely on the street below him.

An hour or so stretched out with little more changing than the positions of the stars. The dirt roadway of Four Corners faded slowly under Vin’s steady scrutiny, became a thick, pasty, rain-whipped mud where water pooled in potholes and reflected the bright glare of lightning.

"Bud?" the young man whispered as he lifted his head from behind the shelter of the rain barrel. One more shot rang out, the sharp report of the gun going off echoing and then trailing to a hot whisper as the single bullet hissed mere inches past Vin’s cheek. With a startled cry, Vin fell back behind the barrel and flipped over onto his belly, drawing his legs closely to his body and feeling the sickening visciousness of the mud sliding beneath him.

It took him a moment to line up his sights but he got off a few shots. The sawed-off Winchester, new to his hands, packed a kick like a horse and sent his salvoes wide of the mark, he was sure, but it felt better than doing nothing at all.

A long silence passed and cautiously, the few people who had earlier ventured out despite the storm made their reappearances. Vin raised himself into a half crouch and, Bud’s stern words ringing in his ears, made for the safety of some out-of-the-way shadows. He knelt back down behind yet another barrel and jacked another shell into the chamber, waiting.

No more gunfire came, but the uncertain, twisted feeling of being watched and taunted crawled up Vin’s back. He sat as if frozen, though, watching as the Coleville undertaker ran out into the storm and bent over Bud’s body. The man turned to shout something to a group of bystanders whose curiosity over seeing a dead body had overcome their fear of the rain and lightning. Two men moved off in the direction of the undertaker’s office.

Two minutes later, they returned with a coffin-shaped, wicker box and together, all three men picked Bud’s body up out of the mud and placed it in there. Vin watched, a dull sickness churning in his stomach as two men hefted the box by the handles on either end and headed back toward the undertaker’s, the undertaker himself following in close pursuit.

Vin sat there hidden under the eaves of the building, unable to move for what seemed like an eternity. When he could move, he stood and hobbled with all the stiffness of an old man through the shadows ringing the sides of the street down to the undertaker’s.

He could only guess what the startled man saw when Vin appeared in the door- a widening of pale gray eyes behind wire-rim glasses, the jaw dropping like the hatch on the gallows, the pause of the hands as they measured out Bud’s body for... for... Vin didn’t want to think about that.

"C-can I do somethin’ for ya, young man?" the undertaker quavered. "Do ya know this gentleman?"

"Yeah, I do," Vin whispered and stepped closer; the undertaker’s eyes widened even more and he backed up as Vin paused by the side of the table on top of which his best- and only- friend rested. He didn’t touch Bud, remembering how the older man was sensitive about such things and Vin wasn’t a touchy-feely person in any case. He just stood, looking down into the pale and rain-streaked face. "Sorry pard," he whispered, voice thick suddenly and speaking difficult. "Wish I coulda done more."

The undertaker drew closer, moving sideways like a crab. "He died straight off," he offered cautiously. "Bullet went right through his heart- he probably never knew what hit ‘im."

Still, for Vin, there wasn’t a whole lot of comfort to be found in that.

Likewise, there was no comfort in knowing Buck was still alive. The blood that liberally stained Wilmington’s bandages spoke volumes more than anything Ezra would have to say on that subject.

Ezra... God, he should be out watching over the gambler, making sure he was okay. Vin had to grudgingly admit Standish knew how to take care of himself- those fancy clothes and airs the man wore like perfume hid more steel than just the derringer he kept stuffed up his sleeve. The itch to find Ezra became almost unbearable and Vin was on the verge of abandoning his post when a sharp scuffling sounded outside the infirmary door.

Silently, Vin pulled back the hammer of the mare’s leg and stood, poised for action.

He’d been riding all day and, by rights, should have been exhausted, but he still felt as fresh and alert as he had that morning. Of course, he’d been running on pure nerves alone and he knew that he’d come crashing sooner or later- just as long as it was later, he decided, he’d be okay.

Alec Tolliver crept around the side of the hotel, keeping close to the rough clapboards and making sure to stay under the eaves so the man atop the roof wouldn’t see him. He made his way around to the front of the building and relaxed a little once he managed to get under the awning. Straightening his dusty jacket and giving thanks for Fairman’s generosity- even though the man probably didn’t know Tolliver had taken the coat from the other man’s closet earlier that day- Tolliver strode inside and up to the sleepy desk clerk.

"Would like a room fer th’ night," he said mildly. He winced at actually having to pay for a room instead of just threatening the man- or killing him outright- but he was here on a specific mission and shooting the man in front of him would interfere with that.

"Right away, sir," the clerk mumbled, swiping a hand across his eyes. "Regular room or suite?"
"Suite."

"Yessir," the clerk said, straightening up and nodding respectfully. "We got the Presidential Suite open. That okay for you?"

A grunt sufficed for a ‘yes’ and the clerk scurried off with Tolliver in his wake.

"Here ya go," the clerk announced, swinging the suite’s door open. "All the finest appointments straight from San Francisco... Heresyourkeyenjoyyourstay." The final sentence spilled out in a rush as the clerk saw something unfriendly in Tolliver’s eye, shoved the key into the waiting hand, and hustled out.

Sighing, Tolliver pulled his coat off and tossed it down on the bed. He thought about following it for a moment- he’d spent the better part of the past few days galloping around at Sulla’s beck and call, and the few hours of sleep he’d gotten hadn’t been enough; he could hear the cries of either Larabee or Dunne through the thin walls of his room in Delphi. At least Sanchez had stayed silent, but the cellar walls and ceiling were thick.

The ceiling separating the floor of his room from the downstairs, however, hadn’t been so thick, and he’d overheard Sulla reaming Fairman out over letting Wilmington get away, and bristled at thinking how Fairman had dragged him into the discussion. In the two weeks since Sulla got him and George out of Yuma, Tolliver had felt like the odd man out in what had once been a seamless, effortlessly-working machine.

Goddamn sonofabitch Fairman, Tolliver thought, half-snarling at picturing the taller man’s immaculate complexion and perfectly-kept hair; somehow, Fairman had managed to stay clean throughout their stay in Yuma and had even kept that annoying-as-hell, arrogant air about him.

Of course, having a reputation as a cold-hearted killer, one-time associate of Kansas Jake Sulla helped a bit. Tolliver had taken advantage of that status on more than one occasion as well. He distinctly remembered one large man in for beating two silver prospectors to death just outside Santa Fe who’d wanted to get a bit too friendly with him... the man had paid a steep price for that.

And Tolliver’d made the man beg to take him.

And Tolliver had.

He grinned at the thought, wondering what the man was doing now.

Thoughts of Fairman intruded though, and Tolliver scowled at remembering the events of the afternoon just after listening in on Sulla and Fairman’s conversation. He’d slipped silently down the stairs after hearing George make some comment about being drunk or in the livery- well, Fairman’d been almost right on that count. Tolliver had ghosted past them and into the stables, bringing his already-tacked horse out of its stall.

He had whipped his horse out of the livery, reins lashing the creature on both shoulders with a loud cracking of leather against hide. The horse charged into the deserted streets of Delphi, almost knocking over George Fairman, who leapt out of the way just in time to avoid being trampled. Fairman’s shouted curse- unexpectedly violent for such a refined man- split the air and despite himself and his mood, Tolliver grinned. He wished he could have looked over his shoulder to see the endlessly insufferable, fastidious man covered in dust and fuming, but he knew better and at any rate, he had more important things to do.

More important things like retrieve either Wilmington or one of the others. He’d located the gambler straight off, lounging on top of the hotel roof in his shirtsleeves with a rifle at the ready. Couldn’t find Jackson or Wilmington, though, and Tanner had gone missing- not like Tolliver had any intentions of going after him.

"Leave Tanner!" Sulla barked from the back of Tolliver’s mind. "Bring ‘em all in, Alec, George- but leave Tanner!" Tolliver remembered the crazy fire that sparked in the usually flat, crap-colored brown eyes and decided he’d leave Tanner, no matter what.

He’d go for the gambler then, Tolliver decided. He pulled a Colt Lightning out of his shoulder holster and checked the chamber, absently staring at the bullet in it.

God, it’d been too long since he’d held one of those- and this wasn’t even his.

Thank you, Mr. Dunne, Tolliver thought.

The cold click of a drawn-back hammer startled him from his musings, but the calm, drawling southern accent froze him completely.

"I have been witness to many things in my life," the voice said mildly, "but surely the purloining of an injured man’s weapons is paramount among the worst of them." Tolliver’s eyes darted sideways and he saw the white-shirted figure of Ezra Standish easing its way into the room, rifle cradled in his left arm and a .45 in his right hand. "Alec Tolliver, I presume?"

Tolliver tried his best to sneer. "If I am?"

"Well, I suppose it hardly matters whether or not you are Alec Tolliver, George Fairman, or Jacob Sulla, seeing as all three of you will finish your lives dangling from a length of rope. However, a most helpful local was kind enough to point out to me the striking similarity between your face and that face belonging to Alec Tolliver- who, not coincidentally, is prominently featured on many a ‘Wanted’ poster scattered about this tiny metropolis."

That fuckin’ desk clerk... shoulda shot him!

"That would have been unwise, to say the least," Standish interjected- Tolliver just realized that he’d spoken aloud. "I have read about your many exploits, Mr. Tolliver. With the single glaring exception of being captured by US Marshals for the wagon train murders, your career has not been one marked by stupidity."

"Huh. Glad you think so."

"You shouldn’t be," Standish said flatly. "I wasn’t being complimentary. Now... I presume that you and your associates are residing in Delphi for the time being? May I inquire as to the specific location?" The hammer pulled back a little more.

"The old Porter house on the main street," Tolliver muttered. "Right next to the livery."

"I see. And are Messrs. Larabee, Sanchez, and Dunne incarcerated in that same place?"

Tolliver nodded shortly.

"And are there any more tidbits of information you will add without coercion?"

"Not fuckin’ likely."

"Very well then." Standish heaved a sigh and said, "I suppose I will have to think of... alternative measures to secure your cooperation."

"What’re ya gonna do?" Tolliver half-demanded. Did the man never shut up? Keep him talking, Alec, he commanded himself. Longer he talks, less likely he is to shoot.

"Oh, I haven’t quite decided yet," Standish said calmly. "I could shoot you right here and put an end to your career- I believe that only two people on this earth will notice your absence from it. Unfortunately, I would also put an end to your usefulness as well, as a dead man would be unable to inform me as to the location of my missing compatriots. I will most likely take you over to converse with our esteemed Mr. Tanner; out of all of us, he has the most personal stake in your apprehension and, I suspect, he will be... overjoyed to see you."

Tolliver tried not to show fear at that. Sulla had told him and Fairman what had happened to Isaac, and Sulla- who’d profited from his brother’s death- had never been one to exaggerate anything. The rumors he’d heard in Yuma had more or less confirmed that some body identified as Jacob Sulla’s had been turned in to the authorities, scarred and cut almost beyond recognition.

Standish must have seen what was playing out in Tolliver’s mind on the outlaw’s face, because he said, "Yes... I think Mr. Tanner would be most happy to see you. Of course, one can never tell what makes Mr. Tanner happy; he takes true delight in the more rustic, while the refined and sophisticated tend to elude and confound him- it pains me to say it, but I have never truly gotten a handle on the man. In light of that, I can’t be entirely sure whether or not he will indeed greet you with... with open arms, as it were."

The gambler broke off his monologue to gesture at the door with his .45, keeping the rifle trained on Tolliver the entire time. "Shall we?" he asked, inclining his head a little, but his voice made the polite suggestion a command.

Defeated, Tolliver slogged past Standish, carefully keeping his eyes trained on the carpet. Just as he passed Standish and before the gambler could move out of the periphery of his vision, Tolliver whirled and attempted to knock the rifle up and away from his body with his left elbow.

It worked.

The rifle jolted up and went off, the bullet ripping through the ceiling.

But the .45, still aimed true, got Tolliver in the side.

Alec Tolliver convulsed once, his eyes going wide in disbelief. A startled gasp escaped his throat, his mouth slack as his eyes began to glaze over. Just as the last vestige of life faded from them, Tolliver fixed Ezra with a perplexed look, as if asking why, exactly Standish had shot him.

Well... you tried to harm me, Ezra thought. And you have undoubtedly assisted in injuring four of my friends as well as Lord knows only how many strangers before them. I trust those are good and sufficient reasons for you, Mr. Tolliver.

If Alec Tolliver thought so, he didn’t say it out loud as he crumpled to the floor. Blood trickled out of the wound in his side, spreading a crimson stain on the blue-and-cold carpeting. Ezra observed the silent tableau for a moment, watching as the blood slowly began to pool around the contours of Tolliver’s body, seeping under the shirt and across the fabric of the carpeting.

"It’s always the Presidential Suite," Ezra sighed after a moment and bent to pick up Tolliver by the arms. He would call down to the desk clerk for assistance with the body and then ask him to take the rug over to the laundress for cleaning. Ezra wasn’t entirely sure how much it cost to remove blood from carpeting, but he felt certain his mother would know.

Unless she’d gotten the new owner of the Ritz to foot the bill for the repairs to the hotel after he and his friends shot it up in pursuit of Eli Joe... Ezra had the sinking feeling that she’d managed just that. He shook his head and hauled Tolliver’s unexpectedly-heavy body out into the hall and shouted for the clerk.

The desk clerk scampered up the stairs at Ezra’s summons and, paling slightly at seeing Tolliver’s limp and bloody form, gingerly picked the man up by the ankles.

"Where’re we goin’?" he asked.

"Infirmary," Ezra grunted, trying to keep his knees from striking Tolliver in the back. The clerk nodded and waddled downstairs, bent over Tolliver’s legs. Ezra followed him down, moving as carefully as he could and cursing Tolliver for being inconveniently heavy. Slowly, painfully, the two men hefted their burden out the door and down the silent streets to the clinic where a light was burning.

"Careful now," Ezra instructed as he began to ascend the stairs. He winced at the amount of noise his boots made on the stairway, and Tolliver’s body impacting against the side of the building made an unnaturally loud sound in the calmness of the night- not to mention the fact that the desk clerk, obviously not a man used to moving with any degree of stealth, sounded like a moose trampling on wooden planking.

At last, Ezra reached the door and, bracing Tolliver’s upper body with one thigh, he opened the door with his freed hand- just in time to catch the distinctive sound of a primed sidearm.
A primed sawed-off Winchester.

"Mr. Tanner?" Ezra asked into the taut, expectant silence.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"Mr. Tanner?"

"Ezra?"

The raspy drawl, distant with almost disbelieving recognition, broke that silence. A moment later, after Ezra’s presence registered in his mind, Vin relaxed the hammer on his mare’s leg. His entire body trembled, as if he’d been held up by stiff wires that had just now been cut, and Vin wondered if his legs were planning on giving out on him any time soon- they sure felt like it.

Came here t’ get some peace n’ quiet... he found himself thinking, and he grinned bitterly, not seeing any peace and quiet for him in store anytime soon.

Not like there’d been much of it his entire life anyway. Peace, quiet, and Vin Tanner never seemed to quite meet up together.

"Indeed, Mr. Tanner," Ezra said after a moment, still from behind the half-opened door, his voice sounding as shaky as Vin’s body felt. "Now, if you would be so good as to open this door the rest of the way, Mr. Satterly and I can more expeditiously relieve ourselves of our- oh, thank you." Ezra’s monologue cut off as Vin snorted impatiently, strode over, and flung the door open.

"Mr. Tanner?" Ezra blinked as Vin appeared to freeze in place.

For a moment, there was nothing except that face leaping out at him from two WANTED posters, one old and one new.

"Mr. Tanner?" Ezra asked again.

"Can ya move him?" Satterly asked from Tolliver’s feet. The desk clerk was hunched over painfully, and he shifted the man’s body around in his grasp to get a better grip. "This guy’s gettin’ awfully heavy."

"A moment, Mr. Satterly," Ezra said serenely before redirecting his attention to Vin, who hadn’t moved. "Mr. Tanner, this is Mr. Tolliver. Mr. Tolliv- well, I hardly suppose introductions matter as Mr. Tolliver is no longer numbered among the living. Unfortunately, I cannot decide whether or not that is to our benefit, or to our detriment."

Vin blinked, not hearing Ezra’s speech but instead seeing the slow dripping of blood from the dead man’s left side and the empty look in the eyes for the first time. He nodded mutely and stepped aside, opening the door the rest of the way. Ezra shouldered past him, making for a bed, with Satterly in close pursuit.

"Drop him here if you please, Mr. Satterly," Ezra instructed as he lowered Tolliver’s limp form onto the nearest bed, and Satterly set down the lower half of Tolliver’s body with an immense sigh of relief. "Thank you for your assistance," Ezra said to the desk clerk, who flushed, nodded, and left, muttering and looking over his shoulder.

Slowly, Vin walked over to the bed and stared down into Tolliver’s face. Ezra must have seen something on his face, because the gambler moved closer to him and bent over the body.
"Are you alright, Mr. Tanner?"

Vin moved his lips, his tongue, found that he couldn’t speak and didn’t trust himself enough to do so. He couldn’t even shake his head or nod it.

Fury welled up in him at seeing the man lying there dead from Ezra’s bullet, and close on its heels came the terrifying blankness he felt when... when...

Sulla’s bulging eyes tracked even the most minute movements of the knife that hovered before his face and Vin, his senses honed to an edge as sharp as that knife, saw the smallest quivering of the tissues surrounding the man’s eyes, the shaking of the whites themselves, the way his pupils would grow to distended disks and shrink to pinpoints.

The man’s mouth opened as if to say something, and Vin reacted instantly, the knife sweeping downward in a blaze of cold silver to slash into the fresh bullet wound marring the man’s leg.
When the scream came, it split the air with a jagged edge. Its sound bled back to Vin in echoes, and through the cold emptiness came a trickle of satisfaction that flowed deep and pooled in the deepest caverns of his soul. Sulla on the ground before him, shaking and whispering futile pleas that went unheard, diminished to almost nothing except for that circular wound now cut in two by a long tear, its edges smooth as silk.

"Oh God, oh Jesus, oh God..." The pleas were nearly incomprehensible as Sulla wheezed them out, his breath clogging in his lungs and his eyes staring at some point through Vin’s body, blank with pain. Vin waited, leaning back on his haunches and twirling the knife absently. Sulla didn’t see it until the agony had visibly loosed its grip, as his body relaxed downward and away from the curling pain in his leg. When the first rush subsided, though, those dark eyes fixed on the knife again as Vin ran his finger over it.

He felt the sharp edge of the knife bite into his skin, felt the stinging of drawn blood, and watched as Vin smiled.

"Guess it’ll be the other way then."

It was the other way for as long as Vin could make it last. Another cut downward through the bullet wound, making it into a bullet shot bullseye through red crosshairs. Sulla bit back a scream and Vin saw that the man had anticipated his move. From the tenseness in Sulla’s muscles, the man was going to try to make a run for it, a last-ditch effort to escape.

Last-ditch effort... he’d find his last ditch, all right. The cold, unfeeling smile took on a life of its own and grew. The man shrank back down into the cold earth, seeing the truth of his death written in two cold blue eyes.

He wouldn’t do that again.

Vin gashed the man’s hamstring and his Achilles heel in two swift, economical motions as if cutting and dressing meat. From the back of his mind, he heard two voices- the deeper, guttural murmurings of the Comanche tracker who’d taught him to hunt animals for hides, the lighter but still gravelly words of the Easterner who’d taught him to hunt men for money.

Both of them did not condone, but nor did they condemn. Instead, soft words of instruction flittered through his awareness.

Shallow cuts in his wrists- if you cut too deeply, he’ll bleed out too soon.

If you need to keep him still, cut here- he won’t be able to walk, much less run or mount a horse, with this tendon severed but he can still move around enough for you to haul him place to place.

A man’s skin is most sensitive here...

No, Vin... see, the shin is extra....

The words, Comanche and English both, mixed together into a haze that blocked out everything. Slowly, the woods around him vanished and then the sunlight and then the man before him and then...

Nothing.

"Mr. Tanner?

"Are you alright, Mr. Tanner?"

Huh?

"Ezra?" Vin asked, licking his lips and wondering when his voice had started cracking so badly.
"Indeed, Mr. Tanner," Ezra returned. "You were dead to the world for a moment, as it were. I would never have thought to see that unflappable expression knocked off your face by a dead man."

It had happened once before... Bud... Vin tried not to think about that.

"Ain’t no ordinary dead man," Vin said flatly. "Sure am glad he’s dead though."

"As am I," Ezra agreed, his eyes darting back and forth between Tolliver and the sharpshooter. "If he had survived, I doubt whether or not I would have been able to tear you away from him- the look in your eyes was nothing short of chilling although I believe that Mr. Tolliver would have been incinerated by them before you could even begin to... to..." He trailed off at the pained expression that crossed Vin’s face. "What is it, Mr. Tanner?" he asked.

"Y’all think I’m some sorta monster," Vin murmured. The second after the words left his lips, he laughed bitterly. "S’pose I am."

"Mr. Tanner," Ezra began, "I hardly think that."

"Then what do ya think?" Vin challenged, his blue eyes moving from Tolliver’s body to fix on the gambler’s face. He’d never gotten a clear read on the gambler; he couldn’t quite see through Standish’s comments about his generally disreputable appearance, rough living, and his devotion to the outdoors, to the truth of the matter.

"I think," Ezra said slowly, his green eyes meeting Vin’s squarely and without flinching, "that you are a man of many talents who has put them to good use."

"Huntin’ men," Vin snorted.

"Josiah is excessively fond of some saying about ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Considering the life I have led, in which I have likewise exercised my talents for monetary gain, I am hardly in the position to make any sort of adverse judgment on your character."

"Scammin’ ain’t the same as killin’," Vin pointed out, looking back down to Tolliver again.
"You would be right on that," Ezra admitted, "However, there have been times when I have quite spectacularly fleeced the... the less deserving. The poor, the destitute, the homeless driven from their abodes by illness and looking for a cure in a man with fancy words and a cut-glass bottle..."

Ezra broke off and shook his head. "As I told you that night by the campfire, life in this town has somehow made me stop and consider the consequences of my actions, both past and present- and I find that there are few things in my past upon which I can reflect with any satisfaction."
Vin absorbed this and finally said, in a voice so soft Ezra could barely hear it, "I don’t know if’n I can do this, Ez."

"Do what, Mr. Tanner?" Ezra asked after a moment, trying to decide whether or not the tracker had meant for him to overhear.

"Find Sulla."

"Of course you can find Sulla," Ezra said. "He’s in Delphi."

"Don’t know if’n I can... shit, Ez. Don’t know if’n I can do this any more. Huntin’... trackin’... shootin’... it all comes back, Ez," Vin whispered. "It hunts ya, tracks ya.... kills ya. Or your friends. I figured... Fuck it. When the Judge asked us t’ stay on an’ watch the town I reckoned Tascosa would keep, that I’d do somethin’ good for once. A fuckin’ dollar a day? Made one thousand off the wrong man, don’t know how much Bud an’ I made afore that. Figured I’d play Good Samaritan for a bit, like Josiah says. Then Eli Joe died... an’ it was like... like God was laughin’ at me, like he was sayin’ my best weren’t good enough."

"Your best is good enough, Vin," Ezra said firmly. Vin looked up, startled at Ezra’s use of his first name and the gambler grinned. "I knew that would get your attention. Now, as I was saying, your best will be good enough- it will be more than good enough. We will find our missing friends... and then we will go from there. Understood?" The gambler put on his best persuasive, lecturing tone and he saw the tracker waver a bit.

"Understood, Ez," Vin said at last.

"Good. Now, if you will excuse me, I will repair to the hotel roof once more. Oh... what do you want to do with Mr. Tolliver?"

Vin’s eyes hardened. "Leave ‘im."

"Here?" Ezra asked blankly. "In the infirmary?"

"Yeah. I’ll take care of ‘im."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Just before the gambler left, he turned to speak to Vin once more.

“Before passing on to other, more distant realms, Mr. Tolliver did manage to impart one or two details which may prove to be of strategic importance,” Standish said, eyeing the sharpshooter as if to gauge his interest in continuing either the discussion or the pursuit of Sulla. The blankness in Tanner’s eyes suggested ‘no’ to both, and Standish shrugged it off, saying, “Well, we will discuss it at a later time, say at around eight in the morning? That would give us...” Ezra’s voice trailed off as he consulted his pocketwatch, “roughly five hours hours to gain some much-needed respite- or for you to gain some much-needed respite, in any case.”

“Go ahead and sleep, Ez,” Vin said softly, not really thinking about sleep or anything else in the present. “Ain’t nothin’ more gonna happen t’night.”

“You know this for certes?”

“Sulla wouldn’t send both of ‘em here,” Vin replied in an abstracted tone. “Tolliver probly just came t’ get either you, Nathan, or Buck.”

“Or yourself.”

Vin shook his head. “Ain’t part o’ the plan. He wants me alone... like before.”

Ezra sensed that there was more to that simple statement than the first blush would suggest, but opted against pursuing the discussion. “In that case, Mr. Tanner, I will be in my room at the boardinghouse and I suggest you do the same.” He stared at the tracker with bloodshot green eyes and scrubbed a hand through unusually ill-kempt auburn hair- it struck Vin that the gambler had gone nearly all night without rest, and most of the day before that as well. Guilt prickled at him and he nodded a quick assent, gesturing toward the door.

“You go on... I’ll be in after I take care of him, Ez.”

The gambler shrugged, fastidiously straightening the lapels of his dusty, wrinkled jacket. “Suit yourself.” And walked out, shutting the door behind him.

Had to take care of him.

The thought echoed in his head.

The man by the bedside heaved a heavy sigh thinking about it.

More than anything, Vin Tanner wanted to destroy the silent body on the bed before him, but somehow he felt- knew- that he had to see Tolliver to the undertaker’s without any further bloodshed. He didn’t know why, but he knew he had to do it.

A lesson to that bloodthirsty half of him, the one that wanted to ravage Tolliver’s corpse for the hell the man had put his friends through, and put Tanner himself through- although, Vin reckoned, he deserved at least part of whatever God had decided would be his penance and if Tolliver were to carry it, so be it.

But that his friends would be tied up in this... Vin shook his head, swinging his thoughts from those of his friends to the man in front of him. The dead man in front of him who could tell him nothing more in the way of where his friends were, how they were, or how to help them.

The slack features came close to infuriating Vin, the emptiness of the eyes so suggestive of feigned innocence it almost made Tanner sick. The face had more lines in it now than it did those several years ago when Vin and Bud had chased down Sulla but still... it was Tolliver. It seemed strange to Vin, thinking that Tolliver had died, as if part of his past had suddenly disappeared.

Before he could think too much more about it, Vin pulled at the tucked-in edges of the blanket on which Tolliver lay. He quickly wrapped the heavy fabric around the outlaw’s body and picked up the limp, unresisting burden. With a grunt of effort, he heaved the body over his shoulder, ignoring the sticky, gripping sensation of cooling blood against his neck from where it had soaked through the blanket and the metallic scent of that same blood assaulting his nostrils. A darker, ranker smell wove its way through the scent of blood and wet wool, a scent he’d caught far too many times in his life.

Death.

Quickly, Vin got over to the door and shouldered it open, using Tolliver’s dangling lower legs to keep the door ajar. He heard the dull, sickening thunk of a skull impacting against wood and shivered reflexively at the sound. Under the cover of darkness, he made his way down the stairs and as swiftly as possible crossed the street to the undertaker’s. The man had long since gone to sleep and it took a moment’s work with Tolliver’s body reclining against the building’s wall to open up the shop.

Moving like a cat in the darkness, Vin lit an oil lamp and looked around for a likely coffin. He located one in the corner and turned back outside to pull Tolliver’s corpse inside. The blanket covering Tolliver’s body caught on something and began to slide off; reflexively, Vin reached for it and caught it just before it fell off completely. After some maneuvering, he managed to haul Tolliver by his wrists over to the coffin and heft him into it.

The casket was a bit small and Tolliver’s knees bent a little but Vin figured it’d only be temporary. He pulled the pine lid over the box and nailed it shut. Briefly, he wished that he hadn’t let Ezra go- he needed a note or something to let the undertaker know who, exactly, was in the casket and not to move it anywhere.

He also needed to wire the Judge and tell him of Tolliver’s death. And the abduction of Chris, J.D., and Josiah. And Buck getting wounded. And Sulla and George Fairman being holed up in Delphi, presumably with Chris, J.D., and Josiah.

So many things to do... Vin’s head reeled as exhaustion caught up with him. The few hours of sleep he’d grabbed on Nathan’s orders seemed to have been catnaps at best. He remembered being able to go days without sleep, or just catching sleep on the fly when he hit a quiet part of a trail.

But then he’d been alone, and the concerns of his world limited to himself and the men he hunted, and Bud had always insisted upon several short watches per night- three or four hour-and-a-half shifts. Vin got used to catnapping, as Ezra called it, and found it difficult to sleep for any great length of time together.

With these worries, though... Vin couldn’t think about all the things he had to do in just a few short hours. Ignoring his instincts, the years of training instilled in him, he turned away from the infirmary and headed in the other direction toward the boardinghouse.

Slowly, mechanically, he made his way back to the boardinghouse and his room, past the dozing clerk at the front desk and the long, silent rows of rooms on either side of the hall. His lower back throbbed painfully, a persistent thundering punctuated by occasional lightning strikes of pain. Like his sins, like all his failures, he carried that pain with him everywhere.

And those three things had added up, and he couldn’t take their weight much longer. Stumbling up the stairs he blindly groped toward his room and his body, guided by memory and exhaustion and little else, fell upon the bed.

J.D. found himself dreaming about the bed in his room at the boardinghouse. While you couldn’t call it the best bed in the world, being nowhere near on par with the featherbed Ezra boasted of with great regularity, it was miles better than the cold, damp stone he had his back pressed against.

My ass has gone from hot to sore to cold to numb, J.D. thought, trying not to giggle about it. After Sulla had hauled him out of that hellhole he’d been in before and dumped him in here with Josiah, J.D.’d thought he was going to freeze to death.

Fortunately- or unfortunately, J.D. couldn’t quite decide- he hadn’t.

“Hey, Josiah?” he asked.

“Yup?”

“My ass is sore,” J.D. informed the preacher. Before he could stop it, the giggle broke past his lips. He imagined Chris staring daggers at him and immediately shut up.

“Well, it’s one less thing that hurts then, J.D.,” Chris said. Josiah laughed at that, a deep and comforting, baritone rumble. “Gotta figure out how we’re gonna get the hell outta here,” Larabee continued, his voice as serious as if he hadn’t just cracked a joke the moment before.

“Trap door’s the only way out that I can reckon,” Josiah said, “unless he brought you in here by another door I don’t know about. But it’s dark all around... there’s no light at all.”

“Underground then,” J.D. said. “Maybe an old cellar or somethin’ like that. Like a cyclone cellar, maybe?”

“Yeah,” Chris said, licking his lips with a dry tongue. “Figure there’s two ways of gettin’ in or out- a door to th’ outside that goes directly aboveground an’ that trapdoor Josiah mentioned.”

“They could be one an’ the same though, Chris,” Josiah pointed out. “It’s damn hard t’ tell where sounds’re comin’ from in here. High ceilin’, I think- we’re pretty deep underground t’ have an effect like that.”

“How do ya know, Josiah?” J.D. asked.

“Bein’ a preacher’s boy, I spent my share a’ time in big churches,” Josiah said dryly. “I visited a few big ones back East an’ a large mission house in San Francisco... high ceilings make sound echo, carries it so ya have a harder time pickin’ up where it’s comin’ from. Don’t think we’ve got a cathedral underground ‘r anything like that, but a ceilin’ high enough t’ confuse the hell outta us in the dark.”

“Explains some of the wetness too,” Chris added thoughtfully. “Down damn close to the water table.”

“This is great n’ all,” J.D. said, his voice edged with impatience, “but how exactly is this helpin’ us?”

“A great Chinese warrior once wrote a book called The Art of War, J.D.,” the preacher said, his voice managing to boom menacingly, “and one of his prime tenets was know the terrain.”

“We’re figurin’ out the terrain right now, J.D.,” Chris explained. “An’ soon’s we get it figured out, we’re gonna figure out a way t’ get the hell outta here.”

“Huh,” J.D. said at length. “Sounds like a plan.” But even as he said the words, he remembered the chains and the cold and how he hadn’t had water for God only knew how long...

And he thought he heard forced bravado in the words of the two older men. Almost as if confirming J.D.’s thought, he could have sworn he heard a broken murmur- from which of the other men he couldn’t tell but it still frightened him.

“Fuck it...”

Just as J.D. sank into something like despair, Josiah heard a small sigh erupt from the younger man. He remembered reading Sun Tzu’s book once, and he could still see one of the prime tenets of the General’s philosophy, staring at him in block Chinese print.

“All warfare is based on deception?”

Deceiving who? Josiah wondered. The enemy? Myself... or the young man next to me?

Everyone?

Where the hell am I?

He stared blindly at the ceiling, at the unfamiliar pattern of wood above his bed. Four walls seemed to press in on him, breathing down his neck, and causing his own breath to seize in his lungs. His mind raced, trying to figure out what had happened, what had brought him here; as it did so, his hand closed automatically around the butt of his sidearm.

The contact with the solid, polished surface jerked him back to reality and back to the boardinghouse he slept in.

Vin drew in a shallow, shaky breath and slowly let it out. The second breath came more calmly and deeply- Tanner felt himself relaxing, could hear the thundering of his heart slow its pace. For a moment, he felt like an idiot, nearly going crazy at seeing a few unfamiliar walls, but with the events of the past few days, he figured he had every reason.

Gotta get this finished, he thought distantly, brushing a hand through his tangled brown hair and wincing when his fingers caught in unseen snarls. Gotta finish this... For my mind, if nothin’ else.

He stood and stretched, making a face at the feeling of grimy, dusty cloth dragging against his skin.

Could use a bath... Vin automatically discarded the notion- he’d just be going out and getting dirty (Dirtier, Mr. Tanner. Dirtier, corrected Ezra) again anyway. Picking up his hat, which had somehow fallen off his head and onto the floor, he crammed it down so that the brim obscured his eyes and stalked out the door.

Ezra emerged from his room a split second after Vin did, managing to appear impressively clean as he always did, although the dark circles under his eyes gave away the evidence of a hard night spent on watch. The gambler seemed to want to say something- probably some remark about Vin’s clothing, Tanner thought- but just as quickly seemed to change his mind.

Part of Vin wanted to hear those familiar comments, to hear anything that could take his mind off the hundreds of things he needed to do- had to do- before this thing could be over. Telegrams to send, horses to prepare, Mary to talk to... Vin shook his head. How the hell was he going to take care of all of this?

“Mr. Tanner,” Ezra said- Vin’s heart leapt as he waited to hear some smartassed remark come out of the gambler’s mouth- “is there anything you wish me to do in connection with our impending outing?”

Oh. He felt vaguely disappointed.

Vin opened his mouth, intending to say thanks but no thanks; instead, he found himself saying, “Well, if it ain’t a problem for ya... ya think ya could wire Judge Travis n’ tell him what’s happenin’?”

“Hm... after the accomplishment of such a titanic feat, I may well be done in for the rest of the day,” Ezra muttered sarcastically and almost under his breath- Vin caught it, though. “Is that it?” the gambler asked in a louder voice, his face a careful mask of neutrality, but to Vin, the man sounded almost... disappointed. The reaction stymied Tanner for a moment and he stared back at Standish, who shrugged uncomfortably and added, “While I admit my bushcraft and survival skills are hardly on par with yours, Mr. Tanner, I can pack a saddlebag as well as anyone.”

“Saddlebag?” Vin echoed. “What the hell are ya talkin’ about, Ez?”

“I am talking about being of some assistance,” Ezra huffed, crossing his arms over his chest and drawing himself up to his full height.

Guiltily, Vin took in the pale face and the dark-circled eyes. “Ya already done enough, Ez,” he said softly. “More n’ enough.”

“Until the rest of our compatriots are restored, safe and sound of limb, there will never be ‘enough.’”

Vin mulled over that comment and was just about to speak with Ezra broke in impatiently.

“Oh, for the love of all that’s holy,” the gambler muttered, “will you just give me some sort of assignment? Any task, no matter how piddling, to perform?”

“Uh... that telegram, an’ the saddlebags too, I guess. An’ maybe fetch Nathan?”

“My pleasure, Mr. Tanner,” Ezra murmured, giving Vin a quick two-fingered salute and striding quickly down the street toward the telegraph office. Vin followed the conman with his eyes, not quite able to believe that first of all, Ezra had volunteered for something and that secondly, he had insisted on Vin giving him something to do.

Considering that he was a good five or six years younger than Standish made Tanner shift a little
uncomfortably. He remembered freeing Chris from that prison camp and how easily leadership had come to him then, and going after Guy Royal when he had hired Top Hat Bob to burn down Nettie’s ranch- the diversion had been his idea, even if the ‘diversion’ hadn’t fallen out according to plan. And the time Chris had almost automatically come to him when he needed a plan to help get Mary out of Wicke’s clutches during that dust-up with Lydia and the girls.

Wonder if’n Ez would get hisself into a purple dress this time? he thought to himself, grinning at the mental image conjured up- Ez did walk awful graceful. And he’d gone along with the plan, hadn’t he?

So how would this be any different?

Back then, he’d known what needed to be done, could see it plain as day and pursued his plans with complete confidence. The others had followed along, done what he’d asked of them, accepted his leading them even though Ezra had five years on him and Josiah twenty.

So how would this be any different?

Still haven’t answered the question, Tanner.

Well... it was his fault this time. A history made of wrong choices and retribution and knowing everything that was happening to Chris, Josiah, and J.D was his fault... What if he made another wrong choice in sending Ezra or Nathan off to do something?

He wished he could just keep the two of them in town- with Tolliver dead, the possibility became attractive. Vin remembered Fairman, though, and knew that Sulla had probably recruited other men to help him out- so Ez and Nate would have to come along.

Not like he could have stopped them anyway. Nathan could be damn ornery when he wanted to be and Ezra would end up either conning his way into going or sneaking out and rejoining them on the trail.

Vin shook himself from his thoughts and headed toward the livery to get Peso ready. Ezra emerged from the telegraph office and intercepted him saying, “Mr. Tanner, Judge Travis has been duly informed of the events which have recently transpired and will, hopefully, be here within the next two days. I specifically asked that he come here in order to expedite any trials or hearings necessary and I trust that he will comply with my request.”

“Thanks, Ez.” Vin still wished the man would make one of his typical smart-ass remarks, but Ezra didn’t.

“My pleasure, Mr. Tanner,” Standish said instead. “If you will excuse me, I will fetch Mr. Jackson.”

“No need to, Ezra- I’m here,” Nathan said as he jogged up behind them. “Mary’s up already an’ lookin’ after Buck. He’ll be okay until we get back- damn stubborn fool’s wantin’ ta get up, but I told Mary she can tie him to th’ bed if’n he starts givin’ her grief.”

“Knowing Mr. Wilmington, my esteemed Mr. Jackson, he will enjoy that all too much,” Ezra remarked dryly. “Well, gentlemen- and I use that term under the greatest duress- shall we repair to the livery?”

“Repair to the livery?” Vin asked blankly, wondering what had possessed Ezra to get him thinking about repairing the livery at a time like this, but feeling grateful at the gambler’s familiar long-windedness. “We ain’t got time t’ fix the damned thing.”

“Adjourn to the livery, then.”

“If’n ya mean ‘let’s go to the livery’, just come out an’ say it, Ezra.”

“Mr. Tanner, after this little escapade is brought to a close, remind me to do something about your vocabulary- or disgraceful lack of it,” Ezra said, punctuating his statement with a long-suffering sigh.

“Geez, Ezra,” Nathan muttered, “give the man a break. Hell, give *me* a break- not all of us have had your fancy schoolin’.”

Ezra didn’t have a reply to that, but Vin did.

“Hey, Ez?”

“Yes, Mr. Tanner?”

“Thanks.”

The gratitude expressed by the tracker left the gambler floundering in a mystified silence- for which the two men next to him were grateful. That same silence persisted as they tacked up their horses, packed provisions, checked weapons, and headed out of town.

Already, the day promised to be hot, and the sun hadn’t even appeared- gray and blue streaked the eastern sky, but the cool of the night dissolved under the first vestiges of heat. By the time Vin broke them for a quick rest and water, the horses had worked up a sweat; the friction of reins and heels against hide had whipped that sweat up into lather. The riders kept the horses moving at a walk as they watered them, not wanting muscles to seize up from the shock of going from a quick lope to a standstill in such hot weather.

Vin got them going again, almost too soon, but he could feel Delphi pulling at him, could feel the need of his friends as an almost physical force. He glanced at the two men riding just behind him and sent a quick prayer up to Heaven, to God, to the spirits, for their safety- four had already been hurt, he had to keep the other two safe.

Slowly, the night faded away and by the time the riders reached Delphi, it had become a distant dream.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Chris was fading fast, Josiah realized.

The gunslinger had begun to drift in and out of awareness, and Sanchez could hear the uncontrollable chattering of Larabee’s teeth; in between coughing attacks and violent spasms, Chris had managed to tell him about being trapped in his own little copy of hell, the small room ablaze with unbearable heat and light.

Excitement and concern for J.D. had blocked out the shock Chris’s body must have felt at being tossed into the hole shared by Josiah and J.D., but after Sulla had left and the three of them had separately and silently come to the conclusion that they couldn’t escape, the frigid temperatures had begun to take their toll. While the preacher could not see Larabee’s body, he knew that the man was in a bad way. That the man hadn’t passed out from shock when Sulla shoved him into this new prison Sanchez didn’t know- that Larabee hadn’t lapsed into complete unconsciousness or died seemed like a miracle.

Hell... it is a damn miracle, Sanchez thought, but the sound of an agonized body scraping around on a cold floor changed his mind.

Or it could just be hell...

Josiah could hear chains rattling as Chris began to shake violently and tried to say something reassuring. The tentative first attempt came out as a croak, and it struck Sanchez that he hadn’t had anything to drink since Tolliver and Fairman had captured them- nothing to drink aside from a few swipes with his tongue against the clammy walls of his prison. The gritty rock had served to dry his mouth even more, though, after he had managed to extract some moisture from his tongue.

He tried again. “Ch-chris?” he managed to say.

“Y-yeah?”

Sanchez breathed a sigh of relief at hearing Larabee’s parched, shaking voice. “Just wantin’ t’ make... t’ make sure you’re okay,” Josiah rasped, trying to work up some more moisture in his mouth, but to no avail.

“I... I’m alive,” Chris said tersely. A coughing fit broke off any further reply, and the chains rattled loudly. “H-how’s J.D.?” Larabee asked after the spasm passed.

“Doin’ okay,” J.D. said in a tight voice that sounded just as dry as Josiah’s. “Tryin’ not to think too much about how I’m feelin’, though.”

“Whatcha thinkin’ about, John Dunne?”

A pause and then, “My... my mother, mostly.... an’ how we’re gonna get outta here.”

“Got a plan?” Josiah wanted to know. Talking with J.D. beat thinking by a country mile, Sanchez thought with a slight grin.

He could hear the soft shushing sound of J.D.’s hair brushing against the rock wall.

“No preacher, I don’t.”

“Things’ll work out, J.D,” Josiah said, trying to make his voice sound as preacher-like as possible. It sounded tired, defeated, and dry as a desert- Josiah hoped help would come soon.

Vin... Ezra... where are you?

The question repeated itself over and over in Josiah’s mind as he drifted into oblivion.

Just after the sun broke over the horizon, three men jumped off their leg-weary mounts and crouched on a small rise overlooking Delphi, masks of disgusts painted across their faces as they took in the shabby, smoky vista below them. All the small fire bins which lined the single main street of Delphi had just been put out in deference to the rising sun, and their smoke combined to form a thin gray haze which shrouded the entire town. Buildings beaten to a worn gray by wind and weather seemed to tilt to the side, leaning into one another in search of support.

Through his spyglass, Vin could see the paint peeling off signs and tar-paper peeking through rough clapboards. Delphi seemed to look almost purposefully bad, not just a failure of its few permanent citizens to keep it clean, but an exacting and calculated attempt to make the town look as disreputable as possible.

If that was the case, Vin thought, they were succeeding.

“What was it Tolliver told ya again?” he asked Ezra.

“That Mr. Larabee and the others are being detained at a house right next to the livery,” Ezra replied, his brow furrowed in throught. “Before his untimely expiration, Mr. Tolliver referred to the place as the Porter house, although I somewhat doubt that we’ll see a sign in front of a private residence.”

“Don’t matter none,” Vin said. He could pick out the distinctive shape of the livery building, and a man leading a lean-shanked bay into- wait. Vin’s breath caught as the man holding the bay paused to say something to an unseen other. He stared a moment longer at the horse, almost unwilling to believe it.

“Goddamnit, that’s J.D.’s horse!” Vin said roughly, noting the large star on the animal’s forehead and the slender near-ewe neck, the big alert eyes. Yeah, that was J.D.’s horse. “’Least we know for sure now that Tolliver wasn’t yankin’ our chains.”

“That’s a relief,” Nathan muttered. “You got any idea how t’ get down there? I’m pretty sure Sulla knows what we look like- he mighta told everyone else in Delphi to keep a lookout for us.”

“You’re right, Nate,” Vin admitted. Sulla would either have the entire town on his side willingly- he believed that the natives of Delphi were bad enough to do something like that- or else he’d have terrified them into cooperating with him. Either way, Ezra and Nathan would be discovered in a heartbeat, not to mention Vin himself.

As if reading Vin’s thoughts, Ezra spoke up.

“Hm... I must admit that those same thoughts have crossed my mind during my cogitations.”

“Ez,” Nathan interrupted, his voice thick with impatience, “whenver you’re nervous, your words get longer. Can’t hardly understand ya. Now, what’s your idea? In plain English this time, not Latin or whatever the hell you’re tryin’ ta spout.”

“Patience, Mr. Jackson,” Ezra said irritably. “As I was saying, while I pondered the possibility of us being recognized by one or more of Delphi’s malcontents, I also realized that we could turn such highly visible profiles to our advantage?”

“How, Ez?” Vin asked. He began to see where Ezra was heading; as Standish outlined his idea, Vin found himself thinking almost in time with the man.

Strange, him thinking like Ezra.

“I suggest that Mr. Jackson and I head into town together, with myself playing the role of the wounded and Mr. Jackson that of the concerned friend seeking whatever medical facilities are to be found in this hellhole of a metropolis. If Mr. Sulla does not see us riding down the street himself, he will almost certainly hear it from one of the citizens.”

“He might send Fairman, though,” Vin interjected. “He wouldn’t necessarily go by himself.”

Ezra shrugged. “Either way, the plan has a decent chance of working. If Mr. Sulla and Fairman both come after us, we will deal with them. If just one of them does, we will deal with him. At any rate, it will be up to you, Mr. Tanner, to gain entrance to the Porter residence and secure the release of our compatriots.”

“What if they have an ambush waitin’?” Nathan asked. “Could have gunmen waitin’ in some o’ those houses.”

“They ain’t on any of the roofs,” Vin said slowly. “If’n ya go in with your hats down, they might not be able ta see your faces real clear, it bein’ half-dark an’ all.”

“I abhor gambling,” Standish said at length, “but I see no guaranteed solution to our dilemma. This plan seems to offer the best chance of success.”

“We’ll have to take it then,” Vin said firmly, glancing at Nathan to confirm his support. Jackson nodded.

“Gotta make this look real, at least,” the healer said, and an evil grin crossed his face. “Ez, ya ain’t dirty enough.”

“Whatever do you mean?” the gambler asked suspciously.

Jackson pointed to the ground and Standish’s eyes followed Jackson’s finger to take in the dust, stickers, and scrub bushes that made up the terrain around them. “Surely... surely, Mr. Jackson, you do not expect me to... to wallow in this, do you?”

“Look, unless you want me to shoot ya, we’re gonna haveta say you fell off your horse when it tripped over somethin’,” Nathan said. “But if’n ya don’t wanna get dust all over that pretty jacket a’ yours, drop an’ roll.”

“Gonna need t’ have an excuse for you bein’ out here at this time a’ day,” Vin said and a grin matching Nathan’s in sheer devilment grew on his face- Ezra didn’t know whether or not the return of the sharpshooter’s spirits was either good or inopportune. “You still got that flask o’ bourbon on ya, Ez?” the tracker asked.

“No!” Ezra objected as loudly as he dared. “First you ask me to slaughter my jacket and now you demand that I sacrifice my bourbon? Mr. Tanner, I have willingly fetched, carried, shot, telegraphed, and packed for you- however, there are limits, and the wilful destruction of perfectly serviceable clothing and the waste of expensive liquor are my limits.”

“Limits were made t’ be broken, Ezra,” Nathan said mercilessly. “Now, you can either do this
peaceable-like, or me n’ Vin can tackle ya. Or Vin could always shoot ya- you’d end up on the ground either way. Your choice.” He held out his hand and Ezra reluctantly handed over the worked-silver flask of bourbon.

“I can’t believe this,” Standish muttered. “I go to superhuman lengths to please and assist my comrades and what thanks are given to Ezra P. Standish..? None. No thanks at all....” The tirade continued as Ezra lowered himself to the ground, grimacing as if being lowered into a pit of rattlesnakes. He gingerly began to roll around, coating his jacket, pants, and face with dust while Vin unscrewed the flask and began to liberally pour its contents over Ezra.  “Of all the indignities I have suffered in my life, this is surely...”

“You’re one to talk about indignities,” Nathan said with great asperity. Finally, he took pity on the now-disheveled conman and said, “Okay, Ez. You can stand up now.”

“At last.” Standish heaved himself to his feet, brushing reflexively- and uselessly- at the grime coating his body. “Good lord, I smell like a room after a fleet of South Carolina merchants has left it,” he remarked as the heady fumes of bourbon trickled up his nose. Ezra prepared to launch another round of complaints, but he saw the humor sparkling in Vin’s blue eyes- a humor too long missing, hidden behind either rage, grief, fear, or that predatory stare Tanner did so well; it struck Ezra how well good spirits suited those eyes, how natural joy seemed in them, and found himself wishing that Vin had found much more in his life to be happy about.

Well, if me rolling about in the dust like a buffalo in a wallow will temporarily restore Mr. Tanner’s good spirits, I suppose dirt is a small price to pay.

Hmmm... evidently the heat has done something to your brain, Mr. Standish. Actually considering altruism? Heaven forbid.

“Now that I am appropriately dusted and liquored up, so to speak, should we be on our ways?” Ezra asked to cover the moment. Nathan and Vin nodded agreement, both swinging astride their horses.

“I’ll watch out for ya as ya go into town,” Vin told Ezra softly. “If’n anything happens, I’ll come in an’ help ya get outta there.”

“Thank you, Mr. Tanner- I was entertaining no thoughts as to the contrary.” Ezra moved his horse closer to Nathan’s so the healer could take the reins. He gave Jackson his best grin, convinced that his gold tooth was dust-covered as well. “Mr. Jackson, shall we?”

“Guess we shall,” Nathan agreed, urging his horse down the gentle incline.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Nathan felt almost uncomfortably aware of Ezra riding next to him and didn’t know why. He thought, with some desperation, that it was the smell of liquor- it practically rolled off the gambler in waves. Or maybe it was the dirt coating almost every visible surface of Ezra’s body. Or maybe it was just another one of Ezra’s superb acting jobs- if Nathan didn’t know better, he would have thought the man to be unconscious, with his head lolling and shoulders slumped forward.

The healer’s unease grew as they made their way inside the town limits; the buildings remained quiet, but Nathan had the sense of unseen eyes watching. Nothing stirred; the town lay silent, as if waiting.

“You’ll be okay, Ezra,” Jackson said loudly into the expectant silence. “Just need to find a doctor is all.”

“I would appreciate that very much indeed,” Ezra wheezed convincingly. “My ribs feel as if someone has seen fit to drive a wooden board against them.”

“We’ll find you a doctor, don’t worry,” Nathan reassured the ‘injured’ man.

“Good.” Ezra tacked on a series of painful, racking coughs to his approval, and Nathan silently
congratulated the gambler on his acting abilities. After the spasm ended, Standish added, “With that horrible Tolliver fellow chasing us for no reason which I can determine, I feared that we would be denied any chance of reprieve or the opportunity to alleviate the pain of my injuries.”

What the hell’s he talkin’ about? Nathan wondered, but even as the thought crossed his mind, the reason struck him- a test to see if the townsfolk knew about either them, Tolliver, or both. He half-wished, half-prayed that someone- namely, Sulla- would step forward to reveal them, to give them a face and an enemy to shoot at. The tension preyed on Nathan’s nerves, and he tried to relax as he awaited a response.

Apparently, Ezra’s sham worked; a tall brown-haired man anxiously poked his head out of a tumbledown building with ‘Saloon’ painted on one crumbling wall in shades of dark brown. The man stretched out of the door like a stork stretching its head and Nathan almost laughed at the apt comparison; the man had a long, angular neck, with a face and body to match, and his nose seemed almost like a beak. He regarded Nathan with large, flat brown eyes that seemed more beady than anything else.

“You got an injured man there?” the man squeaked.

Nathan nodded. “Needs a doctor bad- probably got some busted ribs. You got anyone around here who can see to ‘im?”

“We got Doc Gills, but he’s either drunk as a skunk or passed out in Miss Millie’s room,” the stork-man quavered. “But you go ahead an’ take ‘im onto the infirmary- we call that the old Porter house, an’ I’ll see if’n I can rustle him up for ya.”

Cold fear clutched at Nathan’s gut. Keeping his face blank enough to do Ezra proud, he managed to ask levelly, “Where’s the Porter house, sir?”

“Right next to the livery,” the man said, pointing to another rickety building further down the street. “Miss Millie’s place is on the other side o’ the livery- I’ll just stop by the hostler an’ ask him ta take yer horses for ya.”

“Mighty charitable of ya, sir, thank you,” Nathan said, forcing himself to keep his voice steady and his face empty of everything except gratitude.

“Indeed, sir, thank you for your assistance,” Ezra breathed, hunching over his right side. “Ohhhh... my ribs. Mr. Jackson, I require medical aid immediately...”

“You got it, Ez. Let’s go now.” As if in a dream, Nathan urged his horse down the street toward the livery. Ezra’s horse followed. Jackson tried to move as slowly as possible, to give his brain time to race through the possibilities. He wasn’t a strategist- he was a healer, for God’s sake! Nathan glanced at Ezra, and felt fairly certain that the grimace on the gambler’s face was no longer faked.

“We’ll have to figure out something quick, Ez,” Nathan whispered.

“Believe me, Mr. Jackson, I am keenly aware of that,” Ezra hissed. “For now, we have the advantage of surprise in that they assume me to be injured. However, we will have to find some way to warn Mr. Tanner that we will be proceding directly to the lion’s den. He may not be watching us through his spyglass at the moment- he may very well be on his way down the hill.”

“Your horse know voice commands?” Nathan asked, feeling a stir of inspiration.

“He does indeed.”

“Maybe we could get him t’ run outta town? Might be enough t’ convince Vin we got problems.” Nathan eyed the approaching Porter house uneasily, wondering how they’d gotten down the street so quickly.

“Brilliant strategy, Mr. Jackson,” Ezra murmured. “We should dismount here, on the pretext of you not wanting me to walk from the livery to the house. Only... make sure to turn us around so the horse runs out the correct way- he’d do little good fleeing in the opposite direction.”

With a start, Nathan realized they were standing right in front of the Porter house. He nodded wordlessly and climbed down.

“You okay with this, Ezra?” he asked as he moved to the gambler’s side, deliberately seeking to keep up the charade. “Don’t want you strainin’ them ribs any more than ya have already,” he added in his best stern-doctor voice.

“Neither do I,” Ezra returned dryly, heaving his right leg up over the saddle. Grimacing painfully, he slid down his horse’s side, with a few dramatic winces thrown in; he pretended to bobble a little bit and just as his boots hit the ground, issued a hissing command. The chestnut bolted, throwing Ezra back into Nathan’s arms and coating them both in a cloud of dust.

As the dust settled, the lanky man reappeared. He stood next to Nathan and Ezra, watching silently as the horse galloped off into the distance. “Aw, hell, horse ran off?” he asked sympathetically.

“Yup.”

“Indeed... ungrateful, wretched beast,” Ezra muttered with heart-felt disgust. “Abandoning his master... I sincerely hope he makes an excellent repast for the buzzards.”

“Ah, well, y’all won’t be needin’ that horse no more,” the man said with strange conviction, and Nathan noticed uncomortably that the shaking had vanished from the stranger’s voice.

“You have a horse you would be willing to sell or lend out?” Ezra asked in as guileless a voice as possible.

“No... you just won’t need a horse, period,” the man said in a flat, toneless voice. The .45 that materialized in his hand backed up the meaning of his words. All insecurity vanished as he straightened and eyed the two men before him. “Well, well... Nathan Jackson and Ezra Standish. I just need me one more and my set will be complete. I see Tolliver has done his job.”

Ezra almost opened his mouth to negate the man’s assertion, but then realized that the man believed him to be injured and Tolliver to be alive- two important pieces of information the man did not need to know. Instead, he leaned against Nathan for support and made his face as exhausted and beaten as he could.

“Well, I must congratulate you, sir, on apprehending us, although I fail to see what interest you have in us as quarry.”

“Oh, no interest in you personally, Mr. Standish,” the man assured him, and Ezra noted how easily the man swung back and forth between the stammering accents of a country yokel and the refined words of a well-taught gentleman. “Or you either, Mr. Jackson,” the man continued. “My primary- and indeed, only- interest is with Vin Tanner.”

Good Lord, the gambler had time to think before a waving gun instructed him to turn around and enter the Porter house.

That’s Jacob Sulla.

How many people died, do ya think?

  “Daddy? Are you there?”

 ‘Cause of you...

Keep your reputation...

  “Why did you leave us, Chris?”

 Lost everythin’...

      “Why?”

‘Cause of you...

             ....people died...

“Chris, why don’t you answer me?”

  “I love you, Chris...”

Ella?

Bitch!

 “No... no, it’s Sarah...”

Sarah, are you there?

“I am, Chris.”

“God, Sarah, I’m so tired. It’s cold here.”

“It’s warm in the house, Chris. Too warm.”

“Can I come in?”

“Of course, dearest. But only on one condition... please don’t fight anymore, Chris. Put your guns away for us, for me... Just put them away and forget about them for the rest of your life. Can you promise me that?”

“Yes...”

“Come on home.”

A loud sound of something shattering interrupted them. Chris spun to look at the sky, to scan the fields, the forests in the distance.

“Chris, are you coming?”

“In a minute, honey. In a minute.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The second Ezra and Nathan left, with Ezra reeling drunkenly in his saddle, Vin had started to get a bad feeling. He supposed it qualified as worse than bad, as ‘bad’ had clung to him since the beginning of this nightmare- clung like a cougar, with claws sunk deep.

He had forever to think as he watched the two men make their way down the hill and into town, to think on the past and present, as well as the future- but Vin found himself wishing he hadn’t poured all the bourbon over Ezra’s clothes earlier. The thought brought a bitter laugh to his throat and he choked on it, as if choking on bile.

Damn, Tanner... thinkin’ about liquor at a time like this... what the hell’s your problem?

Beats thinkin’ about other things.

Never knew ya t’ be the runnin’-away type.

Slowly, Nathan and Ezra plodded down the street. He pulled his spyglass out and watched as a tall, lanky man strode across the street to meet them; he could only see general features, the broadest gestures, but he knew that man.

Vin saw Ezra’s horse taking off like a shot from right in front of the Porter house, but even before then, he heard that instinctual voice that told him something had gone wrong and seriously so. That man, with the dark hair... he was what had gone wrong. He knew it.

And knew his friends had walked squarely into a trap.

A trap he had set up for them.

He could see the dim light from the rising sun glint off the shining metal of a gun, saw Sulla gesture Nathan and Ezra into the house. The three men disappeared into the building; Vin imagined he could hear the door slamming shut behind them.

The metal barrel of the Winchester seemed to burn his hands, and he almost dropped the weapon. Part of him wanted to cry, to scream, to howl. Another part wanted to run from this place, from the scene he could see playing out in his head- one, two, three, four, five, dying deaths he had sent them to, with the sixth dying in the care of a newspaper editor because Vin had sent the true healer out to die. Another part wanted to attack, to rend, to savage the flesh of the monster who held his friends trapped in the town below him.

In the most distant part of his mind, another voice whispered insistently, demanding calm.

Can’t live with six deaths on your head, Tanner, it said softly. You don’t even know if they’re even really dead. Yet. But they will be if’n you don’t get your ass down there an’ help ‘em out, Tanner.

Just run away... quick, before you hear ‘em screamin’... just run...

So you figure you can hunt Bud’s killer but not theirs?

I was wrong...

“You’re just a man, Vin,” Nathan had said by the campfire that night they hunted Chanu. “And every now an’ then, a man can be wrong.”

But how often c’n a man be wrong? Ain’t there times when bein’ wrong is worse? I was wrong thinkin’ Chanu had killed Claire... I was wrong not listenin’ to that lil’ voice inside me sayin’ Chanu was innocent... I was wrong thinkin’ Mr. Moseley weren’t no problem... an’ Claire died for it.

But Chanu lived, said that soft, insistent voice of reason, and Mr. Mosely paid for what he did, and that reservation didn’t get torn down by those townsfolk.

The past has passed, Tanner. It don’t matter no more.

Sure as hell seems t’ matter now!

Are things startin’ to get to ya, Tanner?

“Things can only get to you if you want them to, Vin,” Bud said as he stretched his body across the top of the bluff. Soft grasses waved around them and the birds sang under a bright sun; if this had been another place or time, Bud would have remarked on such things, but right now, the man had his eye to the sights of his rifle, his finger eased over the trigger. Vin, in a welter of impatience to see what was going to happen, lay still beside him.

“See Vin, the worst sharpshooters aren’t the ones who can’t hit their target; the worst sharpshooters are the ones who can’t deal with watching a faceless man fall, who think that honor demands that they see their kill face to face,” Bud said softly as their quarry moved across the prairie beneath them- a lone man on a horse, wanted for murder back in Missouri. “They’re the worst sharpshooters because they don’t try at all.”

Bud pulled the trigger and a moment after the sharp crack of the gunshot, the man on the horse fell. He didn’t get up.

“Think about it, Vin,” Bud encouraged as he leaned back on his heels and stretched.

Vin thought about that a moment. “So you’re sayin’... you’re sayin’ honor don’t matter much?”

“It matters a great deal!” Bud contradicted. “If there were no such thing as honor, well... I don’t know what the world would be like. Perhaps it would be better, maybe it would be worse. As a bounty hunter, pick your targets and realize that, if you have to shoot them, the bullet you put through their heads is a more merciful killing than what they gave their victims. More merciful than a rope, and a hell of a lot more merciful than dyin’ in a prison.”

“But supposin’ they rob a bank an’ don’t kill no one?”

“Kill them if you have to, if it’s your life or theirs.” Bud grinned to break the seriousness of the moment. “Or mine.”

Vin smiled a little, remembering Buck’s words. It had come to Bud’s life a couple times, and he’d never once regretted what he had to do. Even living in ignorance concerning Isaac Sulla, he hadn’t regretted it.

He couldn’t regret doing this.

Tanner swung up onto Peso and clucked softly to the horse, urging him back from the edge of the bluff and swinging him west to circle around Delphi; he’d come in on the west side to take advantage of the shadows thrown by the buildings and the extra darkness afforded by the sun’s failure to light the western edges of the town. Peso moved into a swift, effortless lope, unbothered by the heat or his rider forcing him into another excursion after too short a rest.

After he lost sight of the town, Vin doubled back and headed east, squinting into the sunrise. He realized that the rising, blazing sun would make his task more difficult and unconsciously pulled his hat further down on his head to shield his eyes.

Once more, the town loomed before him and as he reached the fringes of the shadows, Vin pulled Peso to a halt and dismounted, not bothering to ground-tie the animal; Peso would bolt from anyone foolish enough to attempt to catch him, but otherwise would stay put until Vin returned.

“Good boy,” Vin whispered to the horse, brushing his hand across Peso’s cheek and tickling him under his chin. Peso stretched out his head to accept the caress and grunted softly. With a last tug at Peso’s ear, Vin rechecked his rifle, mare’s leg, and pistol and set off for Delphi. The town seemed to wait for him, a dark an ominous presence.

Silently, Vin drifted down an alleyway between two buildings to recheck his position; he had kept a mental map of the town in his head as he’d seen it from atop the hill and as he made his west-east circle around it had adjusted the map to account for new perspectives, but with the Porter house as his hinge, the North Star around which everything else- including him- turned.

His map had kept true; the alley led him to the sidewalk right across the street from the Porter house.

Keeping to the shadows, he crouched and examined the front of the building with the clinical detachment Bud had sunk into him during their time together- two windows on either side of a wooden door on the second floor, three windows spaced equally across the top. Hitching post in front of the left window, but no obvious cover with the exception of a weathered rain barrel in front of the livery.

Wanting to see inside the Porter house, Vin drew a little closer until he hovered just on the boundary of the alley and the sidewalk, keeping himself shielded behind a barrel.

Sharp blue eyes spotted movement. He squinted into the light, trying to make out anything more, to see if that figure were Ezra, or Nathan, any of the others... or Fairman or Sulla. He saw the brightness of a white shirt- couldn’t be Ezra or Nathan, he thought. Maybe J.D.? No... J.D. would have been dirty, too unless Sulla had given them clean clothes.

Except that note said they were going to die...

But if they were going to die anyway, Vin might as well shoot the white-shirt wearer in the window.

Dammit! he swore to himself. Tanner realized his left index finger had begun to stroke the length of the rifle barrel, an elongated, circular caress. Might as well do it...

Before he could think too much about it, Vin brought the rifle up to his eye, pressing the butt of the weapon into his shoulder. In one swift, sure movement he swung the muzzle up to aim, sighted down the barrel, and pulled the trigger.

The single shot echoed forever.

The glass took an eternity to shatter.

The cry of pain scorched the air, branding the silence of the dawn.

Vin lowered the rifle and retreated back into the shadows.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“George, take their guns,” Sulla instructed, gesturing toward Standish and Jackson. Fairman, a disagreeable frown flickering across his face at being forced to such menial, henchman-like tasks, nonetheless stepped forward and pulled the two men’s weapons out of their holsters.

“I know for a fact you possess a derringer concealed beneath that most excellent broadcloth,” Fairman informed Ezra. He kept Nathan’s gun aimed squarely at the gambler in order to forestall any attempts Standish would make for freedom. “Murh and Sons, is it not?”

“No... Smith and Wesson,” Ezra snarled as he discharged the derringer into his hand with a hollow ‘click’. He palmed the small gun and handed it to Fairman, who tucked it in his belt.

“You misunderstand me, Mr. Standish,” Fairman almost purred. “I was referring to your coat.”

“Ah, I see now... You would still be incorrect in your assumption,” Ezra returned with the same false, forced politeness. “Saks Fine Clothing, from Denver.”

“Either way, it’ll be a shame to see such excellent material ruined even more than it already has been,” Fairman said sadly. “It would make a most excellent addition to a burial suit, assuming of course, that someone finds you while there’s still something left to bury.”

“Fairman!” Sulla barked, annoyed. “Are you finished?”

“I am,” Fairman retorted coldly. He backed away from Standish, still keeping a gun trained on him, until he stood by Sulla’s left side. “What shall we do now, Jacob?”

Sulla frowned, and Ezra wondered if Sulla had even considered what to do with them- from the outlaw’s perspective, Standish realized, both he and Jackson had virtually been dropped in his lap as if from the hand of God; Sulla still labored under the belief that he had Tolliver to thank for the capture of two more of the Seven, but Ezra wondered how long it would take until Tolliver’s absence would start Sulla to questioning what Standish and Jackson had told him.

He decided that, right around that time, he and Nathan would be as good as dead- along with the others, if they were still alive.

“Perhaps now would be a good time to proceed to the next stage?” Fairman suggested with a hint of impatience in his voice. “Tanner will be here soon.”

“We need Wilmington,” Sulla growled.

“Oh, for the love of Heaven!” Fairman half-shouted. “We do not need Wilmington!”

“You do not need Wilmington, George, because you didn’t see fit to ride out and finish the job,” Sulla snarled. “I need Wilmington.”

“How blind are you, Jacob?” Fairman demanded, half-turning to face Sulla- Ezra could see the skin around the man’s eyes beginning to twitch and his hands shake. He remembered stories about George Fairman, told around the gaming tables in Kentucky- “It’s when that twitch gets started, you know, that he gets dangerous,” an old-timer had said, sipping his brandy and setting two pair on the table. “Yup, it’s that twitch alright.”

Ezra kept himself still, willing Nathan to do the same.

The crack of a rifle being fired made Ezra almost jump out of his skin.

When the glass shattered, it sounded like the earth breaking.

George Fairman lurched, his eyes widening in surprise as blood fountained out of his neck and flowed out of a mouth opened with shock. He fell after seeming to spend an eternity suspended in space, but at last his legs suddenly boneless, and he crashed to the floor.

The bullet continued on to embed itself in the far wall, just over Ezra’s shoulder. Standish could feel the breeze created by its passage, fancied he could feel the miniscule drops of blood shed by the shell’s metal coating. He couldn’t move, though, could only see and hear and feel.

When Fairman and the echoes of that single gunshot died together, things unfroze.

Sulla reacted first, Ezra second, Nathan third.

One bullet took Standish through the left shoulder, angling through the flesh just beneath the collarbone and exiting through the back of his arm. Ezra, who had dodged to the right, found himself knocked off-keel; his legs, rubbery and out of control, sent him staggering into a table. He caught the edge of it first with his right elbow and then the side of his head.

The last thing he heard before oblivion claimed him was the sound of another shot, from somewhere directly above him. It could have been Vin, it could have been Sulla come to finish him off- Ezra didn’t care.

Sulla wheeled away from the staggering gambler and fired again; this time, his shell clipped Jackson on the right arm- the black man had moved with uncanny speed for someone his size, and with uncanny intelligence considering his race. He fired once more, into Jackson’s thigh.

The man fell and stayed down.

Jacob Sulla spun around, weaving back and forth like a caged tiger.

He knew who had fired that shot- Tanner. Knew it because he was the only one left alive capable of making a shot like that. In his quest for revenge he had learned so much, so much...

“So you really did it, huh? You framed Bud Florinton’s kid?”

“Yup!” the long-haired desperado answered, a smirk creasing his dirty face. “Easy as pie. He’ll have half the Territory after him, if he don’t already. So what’s Tanner to you, Izzie Sulla?”

“It’s Isaac Sulla, Eli,” Jacob Sulla told the man. “And it’s everything to me.”

Eli Joe only laughed.

Sulla ran through options in his mind. Stay inside, force Tanner to come to him?

Except Tanner had patience while stalking- maybe he wouldn’t come.

Go outside, then. Would Tanner shoot?

Not if he wanted to find his friends. Decision made, Sulla stepped outside.

He kept to the shadows of the building, senses primed for any movement. Moving sideways, he scanned the opposing side of the street. The single bullet had taken out two panes of glass so Sulla couldn’t guess at a trajectory; knowing Tanner as he knew him, though, it would be from a dark place, a hidden place. His eyes swung toward a barrel set against the corner of one building; the barrel half-blocked a shadowed alleyway.

There.

Sulla saw the rain barrel by the livery and darted for it. As he dove behind its protective bulk, he realized with a start that he hadn’t been fired at once. His heart began to pound, an insistent, staccato throbbing against the wall of his chest. “Where the hell are you Tanner?” he growled

A single shot rang out as if in answer, carving a hot path through the air just over Sulla’s head and burying itself in the dirt nearby. The outlaw convulsed, shrinking back into the wooden shelter of the barrel and reflexively turning his gaze skyward, almost half-expecting to see Tanner standing above him.

“Come out, Sulla!” The disembodied voice of Vin Tanner cracked out, the words filled with an unbeaten and unfrightened command. Another shot reinforced the demand, the bullet creasing the wood just a few scant inches from the top of Sulla’s hat.

Have I underestimated Tanner? Sulla wondered.

“Come out!” Tanner shouted again.

Slowly, shakily, Sulla stood.

Vin felt himself falling into a cold distance as he climbed the steps and then scaled the few remaining feet to the top of what he guessed was the town’s hotel. It was the same emptiness that came over him whenever he lay in wait for his prey, when he stared down his rifle’s barrel and felt the entire world fade away into nothing but his heartbeat and the man he was going to kill.

Fear, hate, pride, pain... they all vanished, their heat dimmed by the chill of metal.

When he heard those three gunshots he knew that Ezra and Nathan had been shot. He knew it.

But he didn’t care. Or, if he did, the care had been pushed back beyond the boundaries of his world, into another Vin Tanner’s mind.

When Sulla came out of the Porter house Vin didn’t jump, didn’t shoot, didn’t think about doing either. He remained kneeling, crouched behind the raised false front of the building, silently tracking the man with his eyes and rifle. When Sulla paused to stare down the alley he’d vacated moments earlier, Vin didn’t move.

As Sulla dove behind the shelter of that rain barrel by the livery, Vin knew the time had come. One final, calming breath whistled through his lungs; half of it was let back out, and the trigger pulled.

Once, followed by his shout for Sulla to show himself.

Twice, to back it up.

Sulla stood, hands in the air and gun dangling limply from his right index finger. His eyes searched the heavens, settled on the lone, lethal figure on the hotel roof.

“Figured you’d come, Tanner!” Sulla shouted hoarsely.

“Got your note,” Vin snorted, jacking another shell into the chamber of his rifle. “You mind tellin’ me where I can find my friends? It’ll sure as hell make this easier on both of us... Easy way or the other way, your choice.”

“You so willin’ to bury five carcasses?”

For a moment, nightmare visions of his dead friends stabbed through the black cloak of emptiness. Vin drew back into himself, his imagination seizing on the imagined sight of five lifeless bodies, playing the scene over and over in his mind’s eye.

All dead, Tanner... all dead... all gone... gone... all dead... gone..

Too late... poor Ezra... Nathan... gone to help and now they’re gone...

In that instant of pain, Vin’s guard dropped. It took that instant only for Sulla to flip the gun back up into a steady grip, aim, and fire.

The second after that, Vin returned the shot, not even cognizant of the bullet passing just over his head.

Vin’s bullet split the air, split time, split Jacob Sulla’s chest.

Blood trickled down Sulla’s jacket and the man stared dully at the thick, oozing redness. He looked up, mouth open as if to say something and, still looking upward, he fell into the street. Vin stared downward at Jacob Sulla's body, remembering.

Vin opened his mouth to say sure, but the sharp report of a single gunshot broke through the chaos of the night. Blood bloomed on Bud’s chest, unnaturally bright and glaring to Vin, who stood frozen for a moment before instinctively darting for cover. He found it behind a rain barrel and not a moment too soon; four more shots peppered the ground around him, one going right over his head.

While he hid and cursed his impotence, fumbling for his sawed-off with his now-graceless fingers slipping over the wet stock of the weapon, Bud lay in the rain. The thick crimson ooze had stopped almost immediately as the heart ceased to beat and, now diluted, flowed a pale pink down the bounty hunter’s side and into the water that pooled on the muddy street.

Vin dropped his rifle and collapsed onto hands and knees.

“Guess it’ll be the other way then,” he whispered hoarsely

Then he saw his hands- his perfect, unscarred, hands and the realization came to him, dimly.

No blood.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When he heard the first gunshots, J.D. wondered what they were; he heard a distant one, the bullet fired by Vin which tore through Fairman’s neck and landed in the wall. The next few shots- those taking out Ezra and Nathan, although J.D. did not know that- were much louder.

And then he knew what they were.

He stared into the darkness, wishing he could see something, anything, but he could only hear- and what he heard was a steady, deep silence, unbroken except for a few delirious cries from Chris and their attendant scrapings of chains against bedrock. Josiah had fallen asleep and J.D. had long ago taken to counting the long seconds between rusty, rasping snores- they seemed to get longer. His fear for Josiah overrode the fear of the memories he’d carried with him since his torture at the hands of Ma Hansen.

Cold, dark, small places... J.D. shook his head. At least this place ain’t small.

But he sure as hell didn’t want to stay in it. How long had he been without water, anyway? J.D. vaguely remembered hearing once that you could go a couple weeks without eating if you had to, but only a few days without water. He’d long ago lost any sense of time, but it felt like he’d been in this hole for a year at least.

Time to get out.

Dredging up the remains of his strength, J.D. sucked air into his lungs and let it out in one full-throated scream.

“HELLLLLLLLLP!”

The word grated in his dry throat like sandpaper, and J.D. held back tears of pain as he
listened for any other sound above him.

Nothing.

He tried again.

“HELLLLP!”

J.D. coughed twice, trying to keep the painful spasms subdued as he tried to will himself to hear what happened outside his prison.

Nothing, and J.D. didn’t know if he could try again, so he settled for shaking his chains, wincing as he felt the shackles rub mercilessly against his wrists, but kept making noise- hoping, desperately, to be heard.

Vin stumbled across the street as if in a dream, not seeing either the body of Jacob Sulla or the few curious, frightened townsfolk who’d stepped outside after the gunshots had died down. Moving mechanically, Vin staggered into the livery and found Nathan’s horse, still with Jackson’s medical bag attached to its saddle. He pulled the ties loose and felt the weight of the bag drag his arms down- it seemed to weigh a ton.

As he exited the livery, Vin became aware of a small audience that watched him from across the street- ten people or so hovering over Jacob Sulla’s body and darting glances between him and it. He gazed back, a flat-eyed stare hooded by the brim of his hat. All of the citizens looked away, preferring to stare at a dead body instead of dead eyes; only a tall, heavyset woman kept her eyes on him, but she wrapped a worn afghan shawl around her as if chilled. Vin kept moving.

He shouldered the Porter house’s front door open and almost dropped the bag at seeing both Ezra and Nathan sprawled on the floor.

Ain’t seen so much blood in my life... he thought helplessly. Oceans of it seemed to surround the gambler and the healer.

“Vin?”

The whispered word was so soft, Vin didn’t believe he heard it at first. But then he saw Nathan’s eyes flicker and the almost imperceptible fluttering of eyelashes galvanized him into action. Three long strides brought him over to Jackson’s side; he knelt, and carefully turned the healer over onto his back, wincing as he saw the ragged, bloody edges of the bullet hole through Nathan’s shoulder and its twin in Nathan’s leg.

“Went clean through, both of ‘em,” Jackson said hoarsely. “Just lost a damn lotta blood. If’n y’ can bandage me up an’ get me some laudanum, just enough t’ take the edge off the pain, I can help ya out some.”

Vin opened his mouth to respond to that, but a voice behind him cut him off. Tanner whirled, hand at his sidearm and ready to fire, but quickly dropped his aim when he saw the speaker- the woman on the street he’d seen just minutes ago.

Her appearance hadn’t improved much with the lessening of distance between them; her ratty blond hair, tangled still with sleep, hung in loose, halfhearted ringlets and the remains of yesterday’s makeup spread itself in an uneven pink blush over her face, mixing in with smeared lipstick. A spectacular bosom overflowed from its constrictive corset and, instead of being a refined china-white, was shiny and red in places, ghostly-looking in others. The tattered afghan looped over her arms flapped like two ragged wings of a wet bird, and the smell of her perfume- redolent of dead flowers more than anything- filled the air. Vin remembered Buck saying something about women who looked like that- something about “being around the block.”

She was beautiful.

“I can help ya out some with that, sir, if ya’d like,” she said in a gravelly voice deeper than Vin’s own. “That man oughtn’t even be awake.” As if that stating that reason had settled everything, she hiked up her skirts and strode across the floor to settle down in a billow of fabric over Nathan. “Lie back now, sir,” she instructed, “an’ let ol’ Hope have a look-see, huh?”

“Your name’s Hope?”

“Yup. Straighten out his legs there, would ya, sugar?”

Two deft hands probed the bullet wounds as Vin watched in stunned silence. The woman turned to him and asked, “Do ya have any carbolic in that-there kit o’ yours? An’ some rags ‘r bandages, too?”

“Yeah,” Vin said hoarsely. “Everything’s in here.” He popped the clasps of Nathan’s doctor’s bag and fished the requested items out. Hope took them and deftly cleaned Nathan’s wounds then wrapped them up, sitting back on her heels with a satisfied “There!” after she finished.

“Some good work there, ma’am,” Nathan said approvingly as he looked over his newly-wrapped wounds. “Where’d you learn all this?”

“My daddy was a doctor at the Army hospital in Alexandria,” Hope told him. “Taught me lots about takin’ care o’ people- medically, at least. My mama, she taught me some about takin’ care o’ people the... uh, the other way.”

So she had been around the block. “You, uh, been here long?” Vin asked as they stood and walked over to an unconscious Ezra.

“Ten years,” Hope said shortly, bending over Ezra’s still form; her bosom almost fell out of the corset as she did so. “He just got hisself a scratch on the head,” she murmured after finding the bump where Ezra had cracked his temple against the table. “Losin’ that blood just made it worse. He’ll be okay... Anyhow, I came out here after the war, spent a couple years in Missouri then moved here. You ain’t from around here... maybe I’ll move on with ya when ya ship out.” Hope rattled on in her rusty voice as she cleaned, bandaged, and prodded an unresisting Ezra.

“Why you doin’ this?” Vin wanted to know. He was so tired, so tired... it had been easy for him to let her take over

“That man out there came in a while ago with two other men- one of ‘em bein’ that dead fella over there.” Hope jerked her head over her shoulder to indicate Fairman. “They been terrorizin’ the place an’ raisin’ holy hell if someone so much as looks at ‘em crosswise- we ain’t had a sheriff since God was a kid in diapers an’ that man kept sayin’ he was gonna kill us if’n we reported anythin’ to the folks in Four Corners or Eagle Bend- he kilt old Tommy Kilborn too, when Tommy was ridin’ outta town for Bitter Creek. Reckon we owe ya one.”

“Don’t owe me nothin’.”

Hope shrugged and finished tying off a bandage . “Ya got those men off a’ our backs. Reckon Caleb Garson- he’s what passes for mayor ‘round here, I guess- has some thankin’-”

Vin held up a hand, but not to break off the flood of thanks she was about to inundate him with- he thought he heard something.

A distant rattling, like bullets being shaken in a tin can. It kept going, and Vin realized that it didn’t sound like shaking bullets so much as it sounded like shackles rattling.

The others.

“J.D.!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Chris! Josiah! Dammit, answer!”

“Vin!” It was distant, weak, and barely audible, but Vin heard it.

Hope did too and heaved herself up from her patient, stumping over to the rear wall of the room. “The ol’ Porter place useta be a hideaway for rebels on th’ run from the Army,” she rumbled. “All sortsa hidey-holes got put into this place ever since it got built- there’s probably some sorta secret catch that’ll open a doorway to a tunnel.”

Vin began running his fingers over the wall while Hope did the same; just when he was on the verge of giving up, he felt his right hand brush against something and a section of the wall swung open to reveal another wall behind it- and, down near the bottom, a tiny hatchway about two feet high and three feet wide.

Steeling himself for the inevitable, Vin crouched down and stared into the blackness, willing himself not to panic at the thought of descending into such a place. A gentle touch on his shoulder made him look up; Hope handed him a small lantern and a hatchet along with the common sense his mind didn’t want to admit to- he needed light and something with which to hack through a chain.

Wordlessly, Vin accepted the offered tools and crawled into the tunnel, pushing the lamp ahead of him. After an eternity, he got to the end of the tunnel and the prison in which Jacob Sulla had held his friends. The light cast ghostly shadows over three gaunt and beaten figures: Chris twitched weakly, hanging from his shackles and crying out in a soft,plaintive voice alien to the gunslinger; Josiah’s mountainous bulk loomed in the corner, still and silent; J.D., however, looked up at the intruder and his dirty, exhausted face lit up with relief even as he shut his eyes against the blinding radiance of the lamp.

“Vin...” he whispered, before passing out.

As quickly as he could, Vin set about freeing his friends, his task made easier by the keys hanging on a ring in the corner- Sulla, confident in his success, hadn’t even bothered hiding them. One by one, Vin freed each man and began to slowly, laboriously, drag them up the tunnel and toward the light.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A cool breath washed across Chris’s face, like clean water over dirty, burning skin. He sucked in a reflexive breath at the coldness against the heat of his body; the coolness and the breathing both jolted him back into reality, but he kept his eyes closed.

“Honey? Honey, open your eyes.”

Chris shook his head.

“Sweetheart,” the sandpaper voice cajoled, “it’s plenty dim in here- got the shade over the window an’ the lamps shuttered. I’ve cleaned all the crap outta your eyes so’s you can open them if ya got a mind to- but I’ll tell ya right now, you’d best open ‘em.”

Fearful of angering the voice, gentle as it sounded, Chris cautiously opened his eyes a crack.

“That’s better,” the gravelly voice said approvingly. “You feelin’ okay, sugar?”

Chris opened his eyes a little more and stared directly up into a mottled bosom overflowing the boundary of a worn whalebone corset. Hastily, he averted his eyes and found himself staring at...

Oh God.

His gunbelt lay on the bedside table next to him, both guns in their holsters as if laying in wait for him.

Chris jerked back away from the objects with a strangled cry. The woman tending to him sat up quickly as he skittered across the bed on hands and heels, pushing himself away from the table. “Get those the hell away from me!” he rasped. “Get... them... the hell... away!”

“Honey, they’re just your-”

“No! Get them the hell away!” Chris curled up on himself, not bothering to see if she followed his instructions. Just before he could hide competely, escape from the black-and-silver horror confronting him, an iron grip closed around his jaw.

“Mr. Larabee!” the woman said severely, pulling his chin up and forcing his panicked green eyes to look into her calm gray ones. “Calm yourself,” she instructed in a more gentle voice. “Tell Hope what’s wrong, why don’t ya?”

The gray eyes were compelling, but Chris could only stammer out, “They all died... it was my fault.”

“Who, sugar?”

“Everyone... my wife, my son... all the men I killed... God, please get them away...” Chris felt the cold, dead fingers of all those people clawing at him, could hear their tortured voices promising him they’d leave if only he’d leave those guns.

“You’re one of those seven men from Four Corners, ain’t ya?”

“Huh?” The question, seemingly out of nowhere, startled the voices into flight. “Yeah-- yeah, I am,” Chris answered, still staring at the woman named Hope.

“Thought so- it just ain’t any group a’ men who gallivant around after each other,” Hope said, a satisfied grin on her face. “You mind me sayin’ how much good you done? I think half the bad folk in this town- which is most o’ the people here- skedaddled just after hearin’ you was cleanin’ things up in Four Corners.”

“Mighty nice of ya, ma’am,” Chris whispered.

She waved that away. “My thanks don’t matter much, but I reckon you got yourself a passel of townsfolk who’re right grateful for what you’ve done in makin’ your town a safer place. You oughtn’t think about hangin’ them things up, so long’s theres a battle needs fightin’.” Hope gestured toward the gunbelt on the table but did not look at it.

Chris’s eyes followed her hand but flickered away after seeing the belt and holstered weapons. “I... I don’t know if’n I can pick ‘em up anymore,” he said. “They ain’t brought me a moment’s peace since I got ‘em. Just brought death... an’ more death after that.”

“They’ve bought life, too,” Hope said softly. “It might take ya some time t’ realize that, but they have. Now we’re leavin’ tomorrow t’ git y’all back home. You might wanna have a talk with that long-haired friend a yours before long... sounds like you two have some things need sayin’.”

Exhausted, Chris could only nod before she released him from her grip.

He knew he shouldn’t be talking- Nathan had warned him against it before limping off to attend to Chris, and even a tired, washed-out and wounded Nathan was not a Nathan to be tangled with- but J.D. had to tell Ezra something before he either went crazy or lost his nerve altogether.

“Ezra?” J.D. croaked.

No answer; Dunne tried again.

“Ezra?”

This time, the gambler’s head rolled slowly over to the side and two glassy green eyes peered at him vacantly for a moment before resolving into recognition. Ezra’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, and when he finally spoke, the honey-smooth southern drawl was as rough as J.D.’s own voice. “Yes, Mr. Dunne?” Standish asked with just a hint of impatience.

“I... I gotta tell ya somethin’, Ez.”

“Can’t it wait until later? Preferably when my mind ceases to replay the entire Battle of Gettysburg in my head?” the gambler mumbled, a whine tinging the edge of his voice.

“No, Ez,” J.D. insisted. “Now.”

“If you insist.” Ezra waved an airy hand in the air, indicating for J.D. to get on with it.

The young man took a deep, shaky breath, praying Ezra wouldn’t blow up at him or kill him for saying this. “You... you know when we were at Ma Hansen’s place?”

“I don’t remember much of it... Are you attempting to insinuate that you have told other parties about my... my unfortunate mental state?”

J.D. stared blankly at the gambler for a moment until the meaning behind Standish’s tirade hit him; he’d promised Ezra to never reveal the memories the conman had re-enacted while hallucinating in that tiny cellar, and now Ezra though he’d gone back on that promise. “No, no, I didn’t tell anyone,” J.D. said quickly. “But... uh... that woman who caught us? I don’t... I thought I killed her.”

“And if you did, well, the world is no doubt a better place for it.”

“But now I’m not so sure,” J.D. said mournfully. “I burnt the house up, but she... she could have escaped. Goddamnit, Ezra, she could still be out there... doin’ things... and it’s my fault...”

“Mr. Dunne, it is not your fault,” Ezra sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. “We are alive, are we not? You were successful in your primary objective- to free us, and you did so in grand fashion. Like I said, we are alive, we are reasonably well, and we are still together. Now let me sleep.” With that, the gambler lurched over onto his uninjured side and dozed off.

And strangely, J.D. felt better as he watched Ezra- Ezra, who was alive and well- sleeping.

Nathan didn’t know how Josiah recovered so quickly; the older man seemed to have a deep well of strength within him. The bullet wound in his right side had become infected and Josiah had spent two days with a raging fever; with Hope’s assistance, Nathan had lanced, drained, and thoroughly cleaned the wound- and the next morning Josiah had been alert, if weak and not ready to get out of bed.

Upon Jackson’ insistence, Josiah remained on a cot in the infirmary commandeered from Doc Gills- who’d quickly discarded his misgivings under the combined weight of Vin’s steady stare and Nathan’s own not-unintimidating presence. They spent three days in the clinic, with Josiah, Chris, and Ezra spread out across three cots. J.D., still filled with the resilience of youth and having been fortunate in only suffering from dehydration- ‘only’, Nathan thought sarcastically- had escaped two days ago to help Vin patrol the town and make repairs.

The third day had worn on to afternoon and Nathan, tired with having to limp around on a crutch, wished the sun would advance a few hours so he could get some sleep. Chris still tossed and turned in fitful dreams, while Ezra doggedly clung to a sleep that would allow him escape from pain.

“How’s it feel to be a doctor, Nathan?” Josiah asked suddenly.

Nathan jumped- he’d thought the preacher was asleep. Once his heart returned to its proper place, Jackson considered the question. “Well,” he said at length, “feels pretty good most of the time, helpin’ folk. Other times it ain’t so good, just watchin’ people die no matter what they’re dyin’ from... Other times it ain’t so good when ya patch some guy up after he gets in a barfight an’ then he comes back the next night so’s you can fix him up for doin’ the same thing.”

Josiah nodded. “You ever feel that way about us?”

“Y’all are a special case,” Nathan said, grinning. “There’s no gettin’ any sense inta any one of ya.”

Sanchez laughed a little, wincing as the stitches in his side pulled against sore muscles. “Reckon there’d be some folks agreein’ with ya on that- my father, for one. I think if he thought that he could beat sense inta me with a railraod trestle, he’d do it.”

“Sounds like he thought you was a lost cause.”

“You could say that,” Josiah answered, nodding. “Me an’ my sister both.”

Nathan knew how hard it was for Josiah to talk about his younger sister, and the only details he’d ever gotten on the topic came up when Poplar had come to Four Corners in his attempt to frame the preacher. Still, Jackson knew enough to know it was a slowly-healing wound for Josiah, and kept silent on the issue. Instead, he said, “Man... it just burns me up, seein’ people get hurt, get dead, just ‘cause they wanted t’ pull some stupid shit, or ‘cause they thought they couldn’t act any other way... an’ you can’t help ‘em, no matter how much laudanum ya give ‘em, ‘cause they’ll keep goin’ back t’ hurtin’ themselves.”

“You can’t save people from themselves,” Josiah whispered.

“No...” Nathan said in an equally soft voice, staring fixedly at his few bottles of carbolic and some stitching silk. “No... I guess ya can’t.”

When he looked up, he saw one of the last things he’d ever expected to see- Josiah Sanchez smiling. Nathan wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Tears maybe, if Josiah was the crying type, or barely-throttled anger, or a grimace of pain. But a smile?

“Hell... you ain’t plannin’ somethin’, are ya?” Nathan asked suspiciously.

“Aw, no, Brother Nathan,” Josiah said happily. “Just came to an epiphany, is all.”

“Mind sharin’?”

“Nothin’ big,” the preacher said dismissively, but the happiness in his voice belied the tone. “Only realizin’ that the only person who can save himself from himself is... well, himself.”

“Don’t sound like that’s too much ta be happy for,” Nathan commented.

“You’re wrong there, Preacher,” Josiah said, smiling. “It’s every reason to be happy.”

EPILOGUE: THE KINDLY ONES

Hope had finished readying the wagon for their journey home that next morning, her callused hands flying competently over straps and buckles. Vin sometimes found it hard to believe her presence- it had the same dreamlike quality which the past few days had; unlike those few days of blood and fear, though, her presence was comforting, steady, and healing.

She had telegraphed Four Corners and received a response- Buck was doing well, restrained to his bed after a couple repeated escape attempts to go in search of J.D. and the others, and Mary was at the end of her rope. The news came as a welcome relief, and Hope’s presence somehow made it better- a thing of real joy instead of something greeted with dull thanks.

It made Josiah smile and joke a little more and swap Bible verses. It made Nathan relax in relief, knowing he had help and an ally in getting each of the wounded to obey him- even if it meant her turning her attentions on him. It made Ezra begin to entertain thoughts of re-opening his charm school, and made him make several withering comments about the enthusiasm with which Buck was likely to greet them upon their return. It made J.D. laugh outright as he darted around Delphi with all his rapidly-returning energy.

It made Vin feel worse, knowing he didn’t deserve any of this.

Chris felt the same way as Vin.

He couldn’t remember the tracker pulling him from that dark, hellish place he’d been in and couldn’t remember most of the first few days until he’d awoken- Hope had spent it trying to get him to drink and giving him laudanum to deaden the pain of burnt skin, while Nathan gently washed and sterilized the bullet wound and the worst of his cuts and bruises. But so much of him still lay back in that hole of pain, twisting as the ghosts of Sarah and Adam and all the men he had killed battered at him.

“You had those words yet?” Hope asked him as he stood near her, leaning against the wagon for support.

“Not yet,” Chris muttered.

“Well, I think he’s off watchin’ the sunset or some such thing,” she said. “Now’d be as good a time as any. An’ ya might wanna take these with you.” She used her chin to gesture to the bluff that overlooked the town, thrust Chris’s gunbelt into the gunslinger’s unwilling hands, and waddled off to help J.D. with something.

Chris wanted to drop the gunbelt the second it touched his skin, but forced himself to keep a hold of it. It’s just leather an’ metal, Larabee, for Chrissake, he told himself irritably. Ain’t gonna hurt ya, ain’t gonna hurt anyone... ‘less ya want it to. He glanced at the bluff at the edge of town, saw the tiny silhouette of the lone man sittin atop it.

Decision made, he strapped the gunbelt around his hips, trying not to flinch at the feel of its weight over his body, and strode out of the town. A few minutes of effort left him drained, but he staggered up the bluff and stood, wavering a little, before Vin Tanner, who eyed him speculatively.

“Ya shouldn’t be outta bed,” Vin said reprovingly.

“Sorry, Nathan.”

Tanner laughed a little. “How ya doin’ cowboy?”

“For bein’ shot, cooked like a side a’ beef, an’ deep-frozen, I’m not doin’ too bad.” Chris eased himself down next to Vin, grimacing a little as stiff and tired muscles protested the movement. He pulled out a cheroot but didn’t light it. “How ‘bout yourself? You look pretty damn good.”

Vin looked away, his jaw tightening. “Not a scratch on me,” he said hoarsely. Tanner stared at his hands, his gaze fixed on the dirty- but unbroken- skin.

“Lucky bastard,” Chris said in a wistful voice, turning his cheroot over and over in his fingers.

“Ain’t so lucky,” Vin whispered brokenly.

“What the hell do ya mean, Tanner?”

“If’n there was any justice in this world, I’d be the one dead or hurt, ‘stead of y’all.”

“Hell, that wouldn’t be fair to us,” Chris countered, wondering what the hell had gotten Vin to thinking like this; belatedly, he realized that Vin had placed the blame for all of this squarely on himself.

Just as he had for Sarah and Adam and all those others.

But Ella had killed his wife and son, hadn’t she?

And those others... they had asked for it, and he had given it to them. They’d danced and fought and lost- but had asked for a partner in him, asked to fight, and had done so knowing the consequences. They had died, but it was what they had to expect as a possibility, right?

Right.

Hope’s voice: He had saved lives. Lydia. Billy Travis. That whole Indian village. Vin’s life, when Eli Joe had him at the end of a rope.

The weight around his hips felt a little lighter. Not much, but bearable, this time.

“There’s a cold place in me,” Vin said softly, unheeding of Chris’s internal battle. “I go there when we’re out fightin’, when I’m lyin’ on a ridge about t’ shoot someone. I fall in there... an’ I can’t stop myself from fallin’. Most times I don’t want to. Stop, that is.”

“But this time?”

“I could feel it... don’t wanta go there no more. What I do when I’m there... I don’t want to do it. Hell, I don’t know if I can.” Vin looked away from the sunset and down at his boots as he finished his speech. “If’n it means not doin’ this any more, then I guess that’s what it means.”

“What’re ya gonna do then, Vin?” Chris asked, trying not to let his distress show at the thought of the tracker packing up. “Ain’t a whole lotta things a wanted man can do.”

Vin shrugged uncomfortably, having thought of this before and failing to come up with a solution. “Don’t know,” he said reluctantly. “Hunt n’ trap, maybe. Head t’ Mexico or Canada.”

“Sounds like a whole hell of a lotta fun,” Chris said, more bitterly than he meant to. “Never figured Tanners were ones for runnin’ away.”

“What the hell do ya mean by that?” Vin demanded. Blue fire sparked in his eyes- the first time Chris had seen those fires in a long time.

“You stayed n’ fought for us, Vin, when you coulda high-tailed it outta here like a dog with his tail on fire,” Chris told his friend. “You did everythin’ you didn’t wanta do to save us. You thinkin’ of runnin’ away now, of quittin’, when the hard part’s over?”

“Thought I couldn’t live with myself if’n y’all had died!” Tanner snapped back. “If’n you’re gonna piss an’ moan at me, though, guess I made the wrong choice.”

“Dammit, Vin, we need you.”

“What for?” Vin asked, narrowing his eyes. His jaw had tightened stubbornly and Chris suppressed a sigh, thinking of how much like himself Vin could be when he really worked at it- stone-stubborn, contrary, and suspicious.

“Don’t suppose keepin’ us alive would qualify as a reason for you to stay.”

Vin appeared to mull that over and Chris watched as his friend’s blue eyes seemed to catalogue each succession of emotion- resentment that Chris would ask something of him, consideration as he gave real thought to the request, a brief flash of rejection, and finally Tanner’s eyes held a light of calm acceptance- the one thing Chris was looking for.

“C’mon, cowboy,” Chris said, cuffing Vin on the shoulder. “We gotta get back.”

“Why?” Vin asked, tearing his eyes away from the sunset.

“’Cause we got things need doin’.”

Knowledge by suffering entereth, and life is perfected by death.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “A Vision of Poets”
 

THE END