The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel Read online

  “All right, I’m comin out,” Trace called. “But I’m still packin lead, and if any of those wolves try this door I’ll blow their heads off.”

  “I have sent them away,” Mereck assured him. “I give you my word, I want only to talk with you.”

  Trace tugged and shoved the desk away from the door, just enough to open it a crack. Nobody was in sight except the Kid, standing quietly a few paces away.

  But it wasn’t the Kid. His posture, his expression, his aura—the dark rage of his wolf-spirit was almost completely suppressed, cowed by that active, hungry nothingness.

  Mereck stood with one hand clasping his lapel, the other behind his back. He inclined his head politely as Trace squeezed through the doorway, the gun in his left hand. “I hope you will forgive my appearance,” he said, indicating the Kid’s torn clothes. He made the gesture grand and gracious, like a prince in disguise. “I had hoped to meet you in more dignified circumstances than these.”

  “Ain’t none of us at our best right now.” Trace sidled onto the porch, right hand pressed against his side as if he were wounded there, holding the knife pressed between his hand and his body. His shirt was soaked on that side with Boz’s blood, and Trace feigned a limp as he crossed the porch. “Fact is, my friend’s bleedin to death in there, so it’d be a real goodwill gesture to our new partnership if you’d let me get some help for him.”

  “I quite understand,” Mereck said, with the Kid’s mouth. “You may know, I have some medical expertise. Perhaps I could—”

  Trace pulled the pistol from his waist. “You just stay there. First of all I want to know the terms. Fairweather offered to have me come live with her and study with her. If I agree to the same with you, will you save Boz?”

  “I will show you how to restore him to the fullness of health,” Mereck said. “It is within your power, you know. And I will extract no promises from you, either. You must come to me of your own free will, uncoerced by obligation.”

  The worms caressing Trace’s soul had crowded closer, sensing capitulation. The blind maw was poised, alert, listening for the signal.

  O Holy Mary, help me out, here. Saint Michael, guide my arm. Boz, I’m sorry.

  “All right, then.” Trace shoved the gun into his trousers and held out his left hand. “You’ve got a deal.”

  The Kid’s small, smooth hand closed around Trace’s, and Mereck’s expression smoothed out into cold contempt. His power lashed through the contact and knocked Trace right out of his skull.

  Almost.

  He caught on by spiritual fingernails, dug in grimly, refused to be sucked away into gray nothingness. Mereck’s soul coiled around his like a bullsnake, trying to crush him and rip him apart at the same time. But the past weeks of spirit-walking served Trace in good stead. He slipped and twisted and fought like a cornered cat, writhing through Mereck’s grasp, keeping him engaged in the gray space while, with his last thread of bodily control, he turned his fist and plunged the knife into the Kid’s belly.

  There was a crack, like lightning, but soundless. The boy staggered and bright silver fissures of pain lanced through Mereck’s connection. Trace pushed back with all his power, and when Mereck faltered, he stabbed the Kid again. He felt warm blood gush over his hand and dropped the knife, pushed two fingers into the wound and ripped.

  The Kid howled. Mereck did, too, as the blood-contact spread up his arm and into his head. Trace felt himself caught in a tug-of-war, between the boy trying to tear himself away from the pain and Mereck trying to tear his soul away from Trace’s. But Trace had a strangle-hold on both of them and he twisted as hard as he could, no finesse, just a hard bright determination tempered by four decades of self-doubt.

  I don’t NEED your instruction, Trace told him. Sabine and I are both doin just fine without you.

  Mereck made a last grab at Trace’s mind: You can’t kill me this way.

  “Come on back sometime,” Trace said, and thrust him away.

  Mereck vanished, leaving the taste of hate and outrage in Trace’s mouth. Trace let go the Kid, as well, who folded to the ground, writhing and clasping his belly and letting out mewls of outrage that were quickly turning to pain and panic.

  “What’d you do, Preacher? What’d you do to me? You sonofabitch, you stuck me! Why’d you do that? You’re supposed to help me! Mereck was supposed to take you! O Jesus God father—No! Master, Master, it’s You I believe in! I brought him to You, You’re supposed to save me now!”

  Trace dropped to one knee and put his bloody hand on the boy’s throat, bore down just hard enough to cut off his wind. “Stop that. Shut your yap.”

  The Kid stopped blubbering with a croak, wide-eyed and shocked—though whether it was the cold tone of command in Trace’s voice or the light hum of power through their skin, Trace didn’t know—he hardly recognized himself, tonight. The Kid’s face contorted with fearful indecision, eyes darting around the sky and the yard, widening as Trace drew Boz’s pistol from his waist.

  “Aw, c’mon, Preacher, this ain’t you.” The Kid suddenly reverted to his aw-shucks put-on voice, and he attempted an awkward smile, despite Trace’s grip on his jaw. Trace let go, stood up, and tucked his hand under his armpit, bore down to stop the bleeding. The wound was beginning to throb. “You’re a true man of God. That’s the difference between you and my pa. He never really believed, and so I never believed. But you know the truth, don’t you? People like you and me, we’re proof there’s a God. Why else would He make people like us, if He didn’t have some greater purpose? If it wasn’t to show how merciful He could be?”

  The groveling tone and self-serving logic would have turned Trace’s stomach, if he’d had any sensibilities left to offend. He backed away from the little bastard, cracked open the pistol’s breech to make sure there was a live round under the hammer. He sensed movement at the edge of the yard and glanced up to see Remy slowly approaching, in the path of moonlight beside the office: buck naked, favoring his left leg, and with a shotgun leveled at the Kid’s head.

  Trace pulled back the hammer on the revolver with his left thumb; his right hand was really beginning to hurt. “You got anything to say?” he asked Remy, over the Kid’s yelp of protest, and the loup-garou shook his head once: left, right, center.

  The Kid sat half-upright, grimacing in pain, blood darkening his teeth. “You don’t wanna do this, Preacher. Think about your immortal soul. You ain’t done nothing unforgivable yet this is murder you son of a bitch the Master’s gonna eat your SOUL AND SPIT OUT THE BONES YOU IGNORANT PIECE OF—”

  Trace shot him between the eyes. He’d heard enough of that talk for one lifetime.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  It had been several years since Trace had set foot in St. Louis during August. He had forgotten just how miserable it was. The heat and humidity had increased steadily throughout the four-day train trip down from Evanston, through Colorado, across Kansas and finally Missouri.

  It beat riding all that way back. He’d have had too much time to think if he’d spent a month in the saddle. Besides, he hadn’t dared stay out in the open that long.

  He rode Blackjack from the station to Hyde Park, and when they reached Miss Fairweather’s street the big quarterhorse turned onto her drive without any prompting.

  “Back into harness, hey boy?” Trace murmured.

  He had forgotten how the house had a presence of its own. Maybe it had gotten stronger, or maybe his senses had sharpened over the summer, but as he stood on her stoop and pulled the bell, he felt watched, prodded, sniffed over. Recognized. Min Chan answered the door as always, but Trace was not surprised to see Miss Fairweather hurrying down the stairs as he walked into the foyer.

  What did surprise him was the wash of relief that rolled over him at the sight of her. Though that was probably the house itself—he felt its protective web close around him as he stepped across the threshold, and despite the weariness and grief and guilt, he drew his first deep breath in a week. All the way back on the
train, he’d been afraid to meditate, afraid even to sleep.

  Here, at last, he felt safe. And he saw a similar relief in her eyes as she halted on the bottom step and took in his dirty, disheveled self.

  “Are you all right?” she said softly.

  He cleared his throat. “I’ve been better, ma’am, and that’s the truth.”

  She came down the last stair and crossed the floor to him, reaching up with one hand. He found himself leaning into her cool palm as she cupped his cheek, then his forehead. “I know you have just come in from the heat, but I believe you have a fever.” She caught his wrist and turned his hand up, frowning at the dirty bandage and the red-flushed skin on either side of it. “Does this need cleaning?”

  “I expect it does, yes ma’am.”

  “You have only just arrived in town?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then … will you allow me to extend you hospitality, until you can make other arrangements?”

  The thought of staying—of being allowed to sleep—in this safe, quiet cloister was so welcome he could have wept. “I’d be grateful for that kindness, ma’am, thank you.”

  “Come along, then. Min Chan will bring your bags.”

  “I gotta tend to my horse.”

  “Of course.” She had better sense than to suggest the Chinese could do that, too. “The stable should be well stocked. And then perhaps you will join me in the laboratory, and we might talk while I treat that hand?”

  “I reckon I’ll take you up on that,” Trace said.

  An hour later, he watched her nostrils flare as she peeled the bandage away from his oozing palm. His skin was stained black from the silver nitrate but the flesh was swollen and shiny, making a clear display of the ring of teeth marks.

  Miss Fairweather made a tsking noise. “This looks human, almost. It isn’t—”

  “It is. Human. Almost.”

  She lifted her head, a line between her brows. “Please tell me you weren’t bitten by the lycanthrope.”

  “That’s exactly what it was. But you don’t have to worry about me catchin it, like the others.” She looked a question at him, and he drew a deep breath and said what he’d come to say. “You were right. About Mereck followin me. He found us out in Wyoming. Found himself a new lackey—the werewolf I wired you about. Set to makin himself a whole pack of werewolves and turned ’em loose on us. Just like the bloodsuckers in Idaho. Spread it among ’em like a fever.”

  Her eyes widened in dismay. “They attacked you and Mr. Bosley?”

  “Us, and a wolf-hunter we met out there. Three of us fought ’em off, but it was a bloody mess.” He’d decided, on the train, that he would tell her everything, that he had nothing left to lose, but it still felt like betrayal. “Boz got chewed up pretty bad.”

  * * *

  REMY HELPED HIM move Boz to the Millers’ upstairs bedroom. They stripped him down and washed his wounds and stitched him up as best they could, but the fever came on before dawn. Boz shook and sweated, and his bandages seeped through with foul-smelling ichor.

  “He need medicine,” Remy said in the pale morning, and Trace’s exhausted brain remembered the bottles in his coat pocket. He went downstairs to fetch them, smelled the barnyard stink in the dining room, and thought he’d better lead the horses out of the house. He could not, at that point, feel grateful that Blackjack had survived the slaughter, but he had later, and ever since.

  When he showed the silver ointment to Remy, the loup-garou winced.

  “Will it hurt him?” Trace asked.

  “Yeah, it gonna hurt like hell, but it mebbe save his life.” Remy shook his head, and helped hold the patient down while Trace swabbed the worst of the infected places with the innocuously clear solution.

  The reaction was immediate, and awful. Boz’s skin erupted in a foam of blisters and roiling flesh. It looked as though rats were fighting under his skin. He shook and shrieked and fought them. He kicked Trace clear off the bed, and Trace would have stopped the torture, but Remy insisted on fetching the ropes and leather traces from the yard and securing Boz to the bed. Trace cleaned the rest of Boz’s wounds with tears running down his face, and when they were done, Remy clapped a hand on his arm and told him to get some sleep.

  “He gonna be out for a while. I stay with him.”

  Trace had stumbled downstairs, past Mrs. Miller’s shrouded corpse in the hall, past Miller’s body in the parlor, went into the kitchen, and dropped himself into a chair at the table. He put his head down on his arms and grayed out for a while. His dreams, not surprisingly, were full of teeth and blood and Miss Fairweather lecturing him on the nature of demons.

  Around noon, the call of nature woke him to an overcast sky and a headache. He went outside to piss, and was leaning against the back wall of the house, gazing slow and stupid at the shapeless heaps of fur and clothing in the yard, when it suddenly struck him that those heaps were his friends. Men he had worked with and lived with for two months—most of whom he liked, some he even respected—reduced to mad beasts and put down like dogs.

  He put his face into the crook of his arm, against the side of the house, and wept—great exhausted sobs of grief and rage. He wept for the men, and for Miller, whose trust in Trace had brought this evil to his doorstep. He wept for Boz, whose loyalty had led him full-knowing into the jaws of doom. And he wept out of guilt, that he hadn’t been strong enough, selfless enough, to sever ties with the person he loved most, even to save his life.

  At length he got himself under control. He wiped his eyes, buttoned up, went to the water pump and got a good chill flow started. His hands and arms were still creased with blood. He stripped to the waist, washed until his skin was numb and glowing red. Then he filled the bucket with water and took it back to the house.

  He started a fire in Mrs. Miller’s cookstove and put a kettle on to boil. Then he went to the dining room to lead the horses out of the house. They shied at the smell of blood in the yard, but he led them around to the pump, let them drink while he shucked their saddles and tack. He staked them to graze on the west side of the yard, where the battle had not spilled over.

  The flies were starting to gather, and the warmth of the day was hastening the stink. The bodies had been horrifying by night, but by day they were just confusing—bits of men and fur patched together like carnival curiosities.

  For a moment it was 1862 and he was standing on a battlefield, looking around at the ruin of men blown apart by cannon fire. He felt the weight of his own flesh and bone, this human machine into which some Almighty whim had installed a curious engine, which simultaneously protected him from and connected him to all this mortality. And he felt a terrible certainty—an old suspicion given voice for the first time—that all these untimely deaths were balancing some vast cosmic scale. Maybe all these other people had to die so he could live.

  And he had to live. Because he knew now what he had to do.

  “Hey Preacher,” said Red’s voice, and Trace startled, looked around to see the young cowboy standing there, saddle over his shoulder, rope in hand. He was as transparent as stained glass in the dull sunlight. “Where is everybody? Aren’t we gonna round up the yearlings this morning?”

  Trace swallowed around the ache in his throat. “No, son, we’re not doin any roundups today. What’re you doin here anyway? Thought you’d be with Hanky and the others.”

  “Couldn’t find ’em,” Red said. “Figured Hanky was playing one of his tricks.”

  “No, it’s no trick, son. He just figured you’d catch up, is all.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  Trace beckoned the boy toward him, laid a hand on Red’s nape, and turned him toward the morning sun. His hand tingled at the contact of that phantom flesh, and his power welled up and enfolded both of them, transforming the overcast summer morning into a flat, fog-banked landscape, devoid of landmarks, restful in its lack of time or urgency. Where the weak coin of the sun had been, there was another kind of light—steady-shini
ng and somehow aware. Trace was unable to look at it directly, but Red stared for a good long moment, head cocked to one side as if listening to a far-off call.

  “Golly,” he said. “I guess I oughtta go, then, huh?”

  “I guess you ought,” Trace said. “Give my best to the others.”

  “I will.” Red shifted his saddle higher on his shoulder and stuck out a hand. “See ya, Preacher.”

  “Hope I will,” Trace said.

  They shook once and the boy gave him a cheery grin before turning toward the horizon. He had only taken a step or two before he was gone completely, and the spirit-sight faded out of Trace’s vision, leaving him facing a mild summer day, and a yard full of corpses.

  Trace turned and went back to the house. He was straining the coffee when Remy came down into the kitchen. He folded his arms in the doorway, wearing some of Miller’s oversized clothes, and a thoughtful expression.

  “Well?” Trace said.

  “He gonna live,” Remy said slowly. “It too soon to know if he gonna change.”

  * * *

  “YE GODS,” MISS Fairweather interrupted, her voice soft with horror. “Mr. Bosley survived?”

  “He was feverish most of a week. Remy knew what to do. We dosed him with silver nitrate.”

  She winced, much as Remy had. “But that would only treat the wounds … I never heard of it fighting off the infection. You do understand that lycanthropy is communicated through saliva, like hydrophobia?”

  “I knew,” Trace said. “We all did.”

  * * *

  TRACE KNEW THEY couldn’t stay at the ranch any longer. Even if he’d had any doubts about Mereck’s ability to regroup, it was only a matter of time until someone came to call on Miller, or some territorial marshal came looking for the Kid.