Magic on the Hunt (27 page)

Nola held out her hands. “Thought you’d never ask. Is it okay, Violet?”

She nodded. “I have a feeling I’m going to need all the hands I can get with that one.”

“With this little angel?” Nola said. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine.”

Cody stepped over to Nola to look at the baby. He had his hands behind his back, like he was in a museum where he was not allowed to touch the exhibits. He smiled. “Oh,” he said, freeing one hand to make a gesture in the air. “Pretty.”

I knew that sign. Knew it meant he could see magic. I hoped it was just the Hush spell worked into the hospital blanket, a light little thing that helped soothe the baby.

I glanced up at Zay, then walked over to stand next to him.

“You look good with a baby in your arms,” he murmured.

I took his hand, careful with his fingers that were still wrapped in tape.

“Don’t get your hopes up, Jones. I’m not the settling-down type.”

“Want to bet on that?” he asked.

“Sure.” I made a fist; so did he. We pumped three times.

I threw paper. Zayvion threw scissors.

I’d lost. Startled, I looked up at him. “Two out of three?”

Zay grinned. So did I.

Read on for an exciting excerpt from Devon Monk’s first Age of Steam novel,

DEAD IRON

Coming from Roc in July 2011

C
edar had stared straight into the killing eyes of rabid wolves, hungry bears, and charging bull elk, but Mrs. Horace Small had them all topped.

With dirt brown hair piled in a messy bun at the back of her head and a pinch of anger between her eyebrows, the storekeeper’s wife always seemed a half tick from blowing a spring.

“Two dollars,” she repeated, her fist stuck wrist-deep in the fabric at her hip, her jaw jutted out like a bass on a hook.

“Cornmeal, coffee, and a bit of cheese,” Cedar said mildly. He knew better than to let his anger show, especially this close to the full moon, in a store full of townsfolk eager to get their hands on the fresh supplies and gears from the old states. “Might be I’m missing something.” He looked back down at the receipt with Mrs. Small’s tight penmanship. “How again do they add to two dollars?”

He knew math—knew it very well. He’d spent four years back east in the universities and had plans of a teaching life. History and the gentle arts, not the wild metal and steam sciences of the devisers. He’d done his share of tinkering—had a knack for it—but not the restless drive of a true deviser, who couldn’t be left in a room with a bit of rope, metal, and a hammer without putting them all together into some kind of engine or contraption.

No, his needs had been simple: a teacher’s life filled with a wife and a daughter, and his brother, Wil. But that life had been emptied out and scraped clean. Leaving him a changed man.

Leaving him a cursed man.

“It’s written plain enough,” she said. “You do read, Mr. Hunt?”

“The part there that says ‘fee,’ ” Cedar said without looking up. “What fee is that?”

“The rail takes its due. You aren’t part of the railroad, Mr. Hunt. Not a farmer, miner, rancher, or deviser. Not a member of this good community. I’ve never seen you in church. Not one single Sunday the past three years. That fee for the rail is less than all those months’ dues you owe to God.”

“Didn’t know the collection plate took hold to my provisions,” he said with a little more irritation than he’d intended, “and I don’t recall offering my wages to the rail.”

The mood in the general store shifted. The men in the building—the three Madder brothers, dark-haired, dark-eyed, all of them short, bull-shouldered, and strong—were listening in. They’d stopped pawing and chuckling at the new metals and bits in the straw-padded crates and were waiting. Waiting for him to say the wrong thing. Waiting for a fight.

Rose, Mrs. Small’s seventeen-year-old adopted daughter, stepped down off the stool where she’d been dusting. She darted behind Cedar and out the door, silent as a mouse fleeing danger. She had good instincts. He’d always admired that in her.

Mrs. Small lowered her voice and leaned over the counter between them. “You are a dirty drifter, Mr. Hunt. Any man out this far west with no plan of settling down isn’t drifting toward something—he’s trying too hard to drift away from something. The good folk of this town want you to be moving on. You’ve brought enough bad luck down on us. First the Haney stock got drug away by wolves. Then the little Gregor boy goes missing. Trouble like you needs to be moving on your way.”

“Trouble like me?” He tipped his hat down just a bit. “No offense, ma’am, but I took care of the wolf before the Haneys lost the rest of their stock. If I recall, there wasn’t another man out tracking it. And if I’d known about the Gregor boy wandering off, I would have been looking for him too. Animals aren’t the only thing I am capable of hunting.”

This time he did look up. Met her eyes. Watched the fire of her indignation go to ash. It never took much, no more than a glimpse of the thing that lived just beneath his civilized exterior, to end a conversation.

Days like this, he liked it. Liked what his gaze could do. But it was easy to lose his grip, to go from staring a person down to waking up with them dead at his feet. He didn’t want that to happen. Not today.

Not ever again.

Cedar blinked, breaking eye contact with Mrs. Small. He pushed the bloody memories away and gave her a moment, because he knew she’d need one.

He took a moment too. He meant it when he said he’d look for the boy, would have been looking at the first sign of his getting lost. But this town wasn’t made of trusting folk. They’d seen too much hardship to think a stranger would go out of his way to do them any good.

Except for the dandy railman, Mr. Shard LeFel. Word had it that all the town held him in high esteem. Word had it, when he or his man Mr. Shunt walked by, folks fought a powerful need to bow down on their knees.

Cedar hadn’t yet met a man he’d be willing to bow to.

The Madder brothers swaggered up, caulk boots making hollow sounds on the shiplap floor. The brothers worked the silver mine. But breaking rock all day never seemed to satisfy their need to bust their way through a man’s bones every time they crawled out of the hills.

“How I see it,” Cedar said, hitching his words down low, quiet, “I’ve been some benefit to this town, me and my drifter ways. Hunted wolves, mountain lions, and nuisances for ranchers and working folk alike. I’ll be hunting for the lost boy. You can tell the Gregors that when they next stop in.”

He dug in his pocket and pulled out a silver dollar and enough copper to settle the bill. Fee included. Placed the coins on the counter, plus a penny extra. He lifted the lid off the peppermint sticks, and took a candy out of the glass jar.

The silver-filigreed bird perched on the edge of the high window sang one sweet chirp. Its head was the size of a child’s thimble. The gears and burner inside it were so tiny, it chirped once every hour and needed half a dropper of water a day to power it.

Valuable, that whimsy. He wondered where she had come by it. That delicate of a matic, a fine thing of little practical use, never survived this far west for long.

Beautiful things got crushed to dust out in these wilds.

Outside, the steam clock blew the pattern for ten o’clock. The town was mighty proud of that whistle that the blacksmith, Mr. Gregor, had fashioned. He’d put it in the place of a clock tower right over his shop at the north end of town. Not half again as nice as the steam bells back east, it was still Hallelujah’s pride and joy and could be heard clear on the other side of Powder Keg Hill.

“Is Mr. Hunt troubling you, ma’am?” asked Cadoc, the shortest and widest of the Madder brothers.

Cedar picked up the flour with the two smaller bundles stacked on top. He tucked the candy in his left hand and nodded at the brothers, who all wore overalls, tool belts, and long coats loose enough to cover whatever it was they kept stuffed in their pockets. “Just a discussion of good citizenship is all, gentlemen,” he said. “Afternoon.”

He headed out onto the stretch of porch that gave shade in the summer and the chance of shelter against rain and snow in the other seasons.

Small Mercantile and Groceries was set on the corner of Main Street—the only street with real gas lamps in town. The other buildings, thirty or so of them with pitched roofs and walls of milled or plank wood, were laid out in neat rows.

A crowd of people were on the streets this morning, come into town for the new shipment. It brought back his memories of the congested cities back east. Horses, carriages, wagons, and folk walking about added to the clatter of the place, added to the living of the place, and reminded Cedar of things long lost.

Even the ringing of the blacksmith’s hammer coming down from the north reminded him of the civilized life that was once his.

He glanced up the street, his gaze skipping the bakery, butcher shop, and mill, drawn, as it was always drawn, to the clock whistle atop a turret made of iron and wood and tin, sticking up like an iron backbone above the blacksmith’s shop. A coil of copper tubes wrapped through the structure and supported a line of twelve glass jugs, as round as pearls and as big as fisherman’s floats. Water poured downward from the top of the tower and, like sand in an hourglass, filled the glass jugs one at a time, until they spilled over into the next and turned the gears inside the tower toward the next hour.

The town needed a thing to be proud of. Needed a thing more than wool and timber and silver to keep it alive. Needed something beautiful. Needed hope.

Cedar looked past the tower to the mountains that cupped the valley, two ranges of snow and hardship, blocking Hallelujah from easier lands and from the Columbia River to the north. He knew there was enough ground between the town and the rise of the Wallowa Mountains that an airship could land and lash, but he had never once seen a ship venture over these mountain ranges—not even to deliver supplies or drop mail.

Hallelujah was in dire risk of being forgotten by a world that traveled easier roads to brighter skies.

A song piped out from near his elbow, soft and breathy. Cedar looked down.

Rose was on the porch, her back pressed tight against the shingles, one toe of her boot propped on the lower rung of the whitewashed railing. Her head was bent, amber hair catching the gold of the sunlight and falling in a loose braid over one shoulder, hiding much of her profile from him.

Around her neck was a little locket the size and shape of a robin’s egg. It looked to be made of gold and silver, though it might just be the shine of the morning sun. He rarely saw her without that locket around her neck, though he supposed there were days she kept it tucked within her dress.

On the outstretched palm and fingers of her left hand she balanced a small wooden plate that had gears set side-by-side atop it. A tiny tin top with a copper steam valve followed the spokes of the wooden gears and gave off a sour little song that changed with its speed as it followed the height and width of each cog. Rose pulled a gear off the plate and replaced it with another from her apron pocket, sweetening the song.

Clever.

He’d bet she fashioned it herself. She had the look of a young woman with a deviser’s knack—a quick mind and clever, busy fingers. She had practical smarts too, like knowing how to stay away from the back of her mama’s hand.

“Reckon I put your mama in a sour mood, asking her about the Gregor boy,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard when he got himself lost?”

Rose was a pretty thing, tan and pink-cheeked, her blue eyes soft and wide as the sea.

“Last night is all,” she said, stopping the top with her finger and slipping it into her apron pocket. “Didn’t run off, I heard.”

“Didn’t run? Think he flew out the window?”

She tipped a glance out from behind the curtain of her hair and smiled, the corners of her mouth tucking dimples into her cheeks. Those eyes were bright with intelligence, and likely a touch of madness. Folk around town had their opinions of the girl, abandoned when she was a babe. Thought she had too much of the deviser’s knack, too many wild ideas spinning through her head than was proper for a girl. But he’d never seen her be anything but kind and steady in the years he’d been here. Deviser or not, madness or not, she had a good heart; that was certain.

“No, Mr. Hunt,” she said. “I think he got took.”

“Took? That what his folks are saying?”

She shrugged.

“They saying what took him?” Cedar couldn’t think of a night predator brash enough to cross a closed door, and there wasn’t a soul foolish enough to go without a lock or brace in these parts. Maybe the boy wandered when he should have been sleeping.

“Said it was the man.”

“What man?”

“The boogeyman.”

Cedar blinked and went very still. She wasn’t lying. That was clear from the curiosity in her eyes. She’s heard someone say that, someone who meant it. He just hoped whoever had said it didn’t know what they were talking about. “A lady like you doesn’t need to fret about the boogeyman.”

“They say he came in the night,” she said, no longer smiling. “Slick as a shadow. Took Elbert from his bed. Didn’t even leave a wrinkle in the sheets. No one saw him. No one heard him. No one stopped him. Not even his daddy. It’s unnatural.” She nodded and looked him straight in the eyes. “Strange. I think that might be worth a fret or two, don’t you?”

Mr. Gregor was the blacksmith. A big man. A strong man with hair and beard as red and wild as the fire he toiled over. Probably looked like a giant to the eyes of a girl growing up in this town.

A crash from inside clattered out, and Mrs. Small’s holler drifted through the doors. Rose flinched, tucked back down into herself, her hair falling once again to cover her face. He didn’t sense fear from her. No, he sensed frustration. She took a breath and let it out like a filly settling to the chafe of bridal and cinch.

“Don’t worry yourself, Miss Rose,” Cedar said. “You’re safer here in your home than if you hid away in the blacksmith’s pocket.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m of a positive considerence not even the bravest boogeyman would dare cross the temper of your mother.”