Heroic Hearts

TRAIN TO LAST HOPE by Annie Bellet

A faint breeze rustled the curtains on the windows and brought the sound of the morning train into my kitchen. The air had held anticipation of summer storms all week, like a child holding her breath on a dare and then forgetting why, sending my weathersense onto its last nerve. Baking in the sticky, expectant heat was faint help but it was something to do. I set the pan of blondies to cool as the horn pealed, almost drowning out the creak of my porch steps. The knock came in the stillness after. I took my time going to the door. When you’re a witch living at the final stop before the world of the living crashes into the underworld, unexpected company is rarely a vacuum salesman or someone dropping in for coffee and gossip.

The visitor tipped the brim of her hat back as I stood a frozen breath away behind the screen door.

“Hello, Cassidy. You going to invite me in?” she asked, her voice as smooth and low as I remembered.

I shook my head and found my voice. “Even here we know better than to let Death into our homes.” I couldn’t find a smile in me to soften the words.

The train sounded again, stopping us both from talking for a long moment as we stared at each other. Stared into our pasts, I imagined. Raina was just as tall and lean as ever, but the sword was new to me. When she’d come back a decade before and told me what she’d done, what she’d given up, she’d still had warmth to her. Now she was just hard, her dove-grey eyes changed to an icy inhuman blue that sparked with inner fire. Her glorious hair was hidden beneath the brim of a stained and worn Stetson. Through the dusty screen I couldn’t see her freckles, the constellations on her smooth, light brown skin. It didn’t matter. If I closed my eyes I could still trace them all by heart.

I had a moment to wonder if she saw me the same. There was more grey in my black braids, more me on my hips and thighs in general I supposed. And still the space between us where everything had gone wrong, daughter-shaped and eternally aching.

“I found her trail,” Raina said as the train faded into the distance. “I found it.”

Her trail, but not Mairi, not our daughter. I knew that from the tightness of Raina’s jaw, and from the raw certainty that hadn’t left me since that dream, that final cold dawn when I’d known with every ounce of motherhood and magic in me that my baby was gone from the living. Ten years ago, but staring into Raina’s expectant, even hopeful face, it was like it was ten minutes. Raina had never believed the worst. She’d never stopped searching.

“We can’t do this again,” I said, unable to meet her gaze. I remembered watching the hope die in her pale eyes once before. I wasn’t sure the parts of me left would survive a second time.

“What if you’re wrong, Cass?” Raina said.

I clenched my fists and turned away. It wasn’t that I had given up, something she never understood. It was that I knew. I knew.

“Wait,” she said, the word a command. “Even if . . . even if you were right, some kind of answers are more than we’ve got.”

I’d known we all handle grief in our own ways. At first we’d searched for Mairi together, until all sign of her turned dusty and blew away and the space between us that had opened when her letters stopped coming grew from our hearts to physical. After, well, I’d come here to Last Hope, to the edge of living, waiting for the train to bring our baby’s soul to the next world. Morning and evening, for years I’d made my way to the platform to watch the ghosts of the newly dead shuffle past until my heart broke from waiting alone in silence and disappointment too many times.

I had known my wife would keep looking, but I’d thought that our endless argument of fault and recrimination wouldn’t be the end of everything, that she’d eventually realize some things had no answers. I’d thought she’d come back to me when she had accepted things how they were, and not how she wished they’d be.

But Raina . . . she’d kept going, straight to where the living should not go. She’d made a deal with Death and taken on the mantle of a Reaper, destined to hunt the earth retrieving wayward souls and escaped demons. Mairi’s name wasn’t on the scrolls, her soul unrecorded. So Raina searched, convinced our baby lived. Leaving me alone to bake away my grief and go on living. Go on waiting for all the empty parts of myself to scab over in time.

She stood on my porch, this woman I’d loved like my own heartbeat, two feet, a screen door, and ten years of pain between us, and repeated the words that would always break my heart even as I turned back to face her.

“I need you, Cassidy,” she said softly. “There’s places I can’t go, people don’t like to talk to me so much. Help me find her. Please.”

Distant thunder rolled, the storm’s far-off power licking along my skin with teasing promise. Wind rushed through the dry branches and rattled the screen like old bones.

“Give me a few minutes,” I said. “I’ll put some things together.”

“Pack light, we’re going on horseback and it’s far.”

I almost asked how far, but realized it didn’t matter. Raina had come back to me, and though I knew only grief lay down this hollow road, she was maybe a little right about one thing. This had to be finished, for both of us, one way or another.

I traded my skirt for jeans and my slippers for boots. A spare shirt and socks in my bag. Needle and thread, candles, salt, and a small box with shavings of oak, rowan, and ash followed. As a last-minute decision, I put the butterscotch blondies into a tin and packed that. I tied my braids up and put a kerchief over them. I checked the windows one last time and then I was out of delay.

“Almost thought you’d changed your mind,” Raina said as she leaned against the porch railing.

I locked the door behind me. “Where are the horses?” The gravel driveway was empty. In the distance the shapes of the town buildings grew indistinct as the herald wind kicked up summer dust. I took a deep breath and could almost taste the petrichor, though no rain had yet fallen.

Raina whistled and a cold tide of power washed over me. My ears popped as the biggest horse I’d ever seen melted into existence from the shadows beneath the spreading oak shading my little house. Its coat was black as ink, its eyes burning red like live coals, and its hooves struck sparks from the gravel as the horse danced up to Raina. It yanked her hat off her head and for a moment my heart stopped as her hair, waves of glorious rich black and silver curls, tumbled free of its twist.

I had no right, but I was secretly, selfishly glad she hadn’t cut it.

“What’s his name?” I asked, making myself walk toward them.

“She, and she’s got none,” Raina said, pulling her hair back into a knot before she jammed her retrieved hat back over it.

“Every horse should have a name,” I said, tentatively reaching a hand out to stroke the horse’s cold velvet nose.

“She’s a Nightmare,” Raina muttered. I raised my eyebrows and she added, “Hat Destroyer has a ring to it, I suppose. Be careful of your braids, she eats those, too.”

Power, cold and foreign to my own, played down my hand. Neither painful nor pleasant, but the mare snorted when I pulled my fingers away. I risked another gentle stroke.

“What’s in this? Rocks?” Raina asked as she stuffed my bag into her own saddlebags.

“Butterscotch blondies,” I said. “You wanted a hearth witch, you are getting a hearth witch,” I added when she shook her head at me.

Raina leapt effortlessly into the saddle and then extended her hand.

She still hadn’t told me where we were going, but I looked at her outstretched hand, the same hand that had rubbed my swollen feet when I was pregnant, that had lifted our daughter up whenever she fell, and had held me through all our darkest nights save the last. Her strong fingers that had intertwined with mine a thousand times, and I figured, what was one more. I crossed the distance between us and let her pull me up.

Raina warned me that “she goes fast, hang on,” and that was all I got before the Nightmare took off at a smooth but terrifying gallop. My arms went around Raina’s narrow waist before I could stop myself, but I let go and grabbed for loose ties on the saddle to steady myself before she could say a word. I kept my eyes fixed on her back after a stomach-dropping glance to the landscape rushing by in a blur.

We were going too quickly to talk; the wind created by our speed would have whipped the words away. I gritted my teeth in frustration but decided to focus on staying on the Nightmare and not losing my breakfast. The ride gave me far too much time to chew over the past as memories I’d thought well-buried churned to the surface.

Mairi had taken after me in her magic, her love of living creatures great and small, of gardening. Also in her eyes, the color if not the texture of her hair, and the shape of her nose. But in all else, height, loose curls, and bullheaded desire to get her own way, she’d taken after Raina.

Mairi had left home at seventeen. Raina had wanted to go after her, but I’d stopped her. Mairi was like one of Raina’s mustangs; I worried that if we tried too hard to tie her down, we’d lose her worse. I thought we could let her run and feel out the world a little, that then she’d come home when the money ran out and she realized that being alone wasn’t freedom.

The letters started coming a few months after she left and they had felt like vindication for me while soothing Raina’s anger. Mairi had joined a traveling carnival, working with the horses and learning acrobatics. She wrote detailed and funny accounts of her new friends, of the carnival life, and always at the end expressed that she loved us both and was glad we hadn’t done, in her words, anything too rash about her leaving.

The letters might have calmed Raina, but I could see now, with the gift of a decade of heartache and self-recrimination, that the rift between us had started when our daughter left. Tiny stress fractures in what we’d always thought was a solid foundation. Mairi was careful to never mention places or too many names; she used nicknames for everyone, even the horses. She wanted to assure us she was fine, but she was wary of us dragging her home.

For a solid year, the letters came every couple weeks, not quite clockwork but regular enough to look forward to. Then I had the dream, the nightmare that ended everything. I’d heard our baby screaming for us and felt when she stopped. I’d awoken screaming. Raina refused to believe it was more than a mother’s anxious dreaming.

But there were no more letters. It had been a couple weeks since the last when I had the dream, and week after painful week scraped by, no letters. I knew in my heart that something terrible had happened. Three weeks after, Raina and I started the search. We had little to go on from Mairi’s words; it was clear a week into our search that she’d changed more details than we knew.

Weeks of dead ends and false trails before my tired soul couldn’t take it anymore. We fought about every small thing, round and round as we hashed out the what-ifs and could-have-dones. Until Raina left me, riding off without so much as a backward glance and I retreated to Last Hope, baking and waiting for the train that might bring my baby past me one last time.

Tears stung my eyes and I told myself it was from the wind. The urge to press my cheek against Raina’s leather-clad back so straight and strong in front of me was nearly overwhelming. She’d come to me, finally, asked me to take this journey with her one last time, but I knew it wasn’t more, that some canyons can’t be bridged. So I sat straight, blinked away my tears, and hung on.

The day fled past us with the miles and the sun was kissing the tops of lodge pole pines when the Nightmare slowed to a walk. The landscape had changed from the open prairie and oak-dotted land around Last Hope to rocky and pine forested, mountains I didn’t recognize rising from dusk-shadowed foothills. Train tracks stretched alongside the hard-packed road we ambled up and I smelled wood smoke.

“Just ahead.” Raina spoke for the first time as I shifted my sore body behind her. “There’s a little town, got a hotel. I have a receipt signed by Mairi from there. It was in some things sold at a flea market, tucked in a book of western flora and fauna.”

Raina halted the Nightmare and slung her leg over the horse’s neck, dropping to the ground before I could respond. She offered her hand but I ignored it and dismounted with all the grace of a sack of potatoes. Sore, bitter potatoes.

“That’s all you got?” I said as I peeled my dignity and my ass up off the ground. “A receipt?”

“It’s more than we ever had,” she said, arms crossed. “But the man who runs the place won’t talk to me. He just locked everything up when I tried to talk to him, and then threatened me with a gun.”

“Maybe you should have tried not wearing the sword,” I muttered. The long blade was sheathed in black tooled leather that echoed her vest, the cold-looking sapphire in the hilt glinting with inner fire.

Raina put a hand on the pommel. “I think you’ll have an easier time, people always liked talking to you.”

“And I won’t make any wards flare up,” I guessed. From Raina’s tight smile, my guess was right. The hotel owner was smart enough to at least salt his thresholds, which though meant to ward against evil spirits and demons would still cause a problem for a Reaper. After all, they came from the same place as escaped demons.

“The carnival came through here,” Raina said. “I’m sure of that much. Someone will know where it went after.” She set out up the road, walking with a confidence that said I’d follow.

I wasn’t about to be left alone here an unknown number of miles from home, so I supposed her confidence was justified. “You check the next town up the road?” I asked as I fell in beside her, taking two steps for every one of hers until she noticed and slowed down.

“The road branches, as do the tracks. I checked both ways a while but all I got was closed doors and nervous looks.” Raina’s tense shoulders belied the offhand tone in her voice. A small muscle ticked in her jaw, one of her frustration tells. When that muscle moved, a fight was coming sure as wind rising before a storm.

“Nice to be needed,” I said under my breath. I understood why she’d tried without me but I couldn’t fully quell the hurt in my heart as it hit home how much coming back to me had been a last resort.

“You think Mairi is dead. I don’t.” Raina stopped so abruptly I walked three steps past her as she said the words. “Talking to you about finding her was like begging a river to run uphill. So don’t get your panties bunched because I didn’t come to you sooner; you made it real clear this wasn’t a journey you were taking to the end.”

I forced my fists to unclench as I spun and stared up into her face. There were a hundred things I wanted to say, but I’d said all of them before a hundred times.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” I said after a couple deep breaths. I knew Mairi was gone, but I was willing to be wrong. Even if hope was breaking me into smaller pieces. Even if ten years was an alarming amount of time to go without writing her mothers.

Raina stepped back like I’d hit her and finally nodded. “Come on, then.”

The Nightmare didn’t follow. I assumed she’d go back to wherever it was she lurked until Raina called her. We walked side by side into the town. It wasn’t that different from Last Hope, little bigger maybe but hard to tell from how many places were up among the trees. Lights were flaring to life as the sun sank into a red haze and a few people gave us wide berth as they went about their evening business.

The hotel stood a few buildings down from the train station, a big clean white sign with green lettering proclaiming what it was. The paint was scuffed but the steps didn’t creak as I walked up them, leaving Raina behind me at the walkway. She handed me the carefully folded receipt: the linen paper scrap gone soft with age but the ink still visible. I didn’t look too hard at it, not trusting Mairi’s distinct swirling signature not to break my heart anew.

A bell dinged as I pushed through the door into a warm, somewhat shabby interior that smelled of tobacco smoke and faintly lemon-scented floor soap.

“Can I help you?” The man behind the long counter that appeared to double as a bar looked up as I walked in. He had a three-piece suit whose condition matched the hotel, wide brown eyes deep set into his pleasant face, and a nervously groomed mustache.

“I’m hoping so,” I said, putting on my best Sunday potluck smile. “I’m looking for information on a traveling show that came through here, maybe nine, ten years ago?” I laid the receipt on the counter and smoothed it out. “Young woman with them, would have been working with the horses most likely. Probably looked like a taller, younger me, same coloring, but long hair and more big curls than mine. My daughter,” I added as the man squinted at the receipt.

He rubbed his hand absently over his heart and shook his head, his eyes coming up to study my face. “Can’t say I remember.”

I wondered if he wanted a bribe but his expression had flat dismissiveness in it, not avarice. “This is from your hotel,” I said, not making it a question. The name matched, the little drawn logo, all of it. The place had been fancier a decade ago, I imagined, glancing around at the polished wood and brass, the curtains clean but worn thin, the carpets likewise.

“Lot of people come through here, ma’am. I only remember the ones that make trouble or that come back. Guess your daughter wasn’t either of those.” His smile was bland as he studied the receipt again. “There was a carnival that came through I don’t know, maybe a decade gone. They used our stables and the yard out back for a night, but they didn’t stay. Can’t say where they went, they just paid for feed and space for the night. Here, it’s rubbed off mostly but you can see the line there.”

The line was in a crease and whatever had been written was long gone beyond a few traces of ink. I didn’t know if I believed him but I couldn’t think why he’d lie to me. “Anyone else around during that time that might know where they went?” I asked.

He was about to answer when he looked past me and through the windows. The blood drained from his face, turning his light brown skin greyish, and he started reaching under the bar. Turning, I saw that Raina was wandering along the big porch, a shadow with blue coals for eyes and armed with a sword.

“She’s not here to hurt anyone,” I said without thinking as the hotelier pulled a sawed-off from beneath the bar.

“You with her?” He pointed the sawed-off at me but his finger wasn’t on the trigger.

“She’s also the girl’s mother,” I said, keeping my voice low and soft. “We’re just trying to find our daughter.”

“She’s a Reaper. Came through here last week rattling the windows and yelling at folk. We’re God-fearing people here, ma’am, we bury our dead proper and take no recourse from demons. We have no need for a Reaper here.”

Oh, Raina. I sighed and took a slow step back from the counter, folding the receipt before sliding it into my pocket. “We’re going, you can put away that gun. You’ll want to see a doctor about your heart,” I said.

“It’s just indigestion,” the man said, setting the gun on the bar. He kept his hand on it as though to reassure himself.

His aura and the way he’d been moving said otherwise, but I let it go. People didn’t want us here, and I wasn’t about to start revealing I was a witch to add any fuel to their suspicions.

I walked out onto the porch, keeping half an eye on the proprietor until the door was firmly closed behind me. Raina joined me.

“He doesn’t know anything,” I said, “though you walking around like that sure didn’t loosen his tongue.”

“She was here,” Raina said.

“It’s been ten years. The carnival only used his yard and bought some fodder for the animals. He doesn’t remember Mairi and he doesn’t know where they went.”

“I knew her,” said a soft, high voice. A girl with golden brown skin and wide-set brown eyes in a blue gingham dress who couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen came around the side of the hotel but stopped short of where she’d be seen from the windows. “Meet me on the other side of the station.” She didn’t wait for an answer before disappearing around the side again.

Raina gave me an “I told you so” look but mercifully held her tongue as we made our way to the train station and waited on the far side.

The girl showed up a few minutes later. She looked at Raina with curious, fearful eyes and stepped nearer to me.

“I’m Blythe,” she said. “That’s my daddy’s hotel. I heard you asking about the girl with the horses, the carnival? You look like her. I mean, she wasn’t fat or short but, oh, sorry. Mama says I can talk the ear off an earthworm.” She flushed and ducked her head, her black rag-curls bouncing. “You a witch, too?”

My tired head hurt trying to follow the flood of words, and I nodded without thinking. “We just want to find Mairi,” I said. “You remember her?” The girl couldn’t have been more than eight back when the carnival came through.

“She was really nice. Said her name was May. She fixed my doll, wrapped this special string around her and said some magic words and it was like Ben had never broken her leg right off at all.”

“Blythe,” Raina said, pulling the girl’s attention to her. “Where did May go? Do you know?”

“They went to White Water.” She pointed down the tracks. “Follow the road and stay left, you’ll see it in a couple days. It’s not much now, just the train station and a few folk who stayed after the mines emptied. But May’s friend Alice had a sweetheart there and she married him and they live in a big house. She’d know where May went after the mountain slid down.”

“The mountain slid down?” I asked, dread pitching a tent in the empty pit of my belly.

“The old mine blew—well, part of it. Right when the carnival was there. Half the mountain came down. Missed the town, though. I remember we felt the shaking even from here. Nobody died,” she assured me with a crooked-toothed smile.

“How do we find Alice’s house?” I looked at Raina, but her face was a mask in the gloom, the flames of her eyes unreadable.

“Go into town and follow the small road until you see the creek. After that you’ll see the flowers. You really can’t miss it. Next year I’ll be eighteen and then I can visit Alice. Mama thinks she’s a witch ’cause of those flowers.”

“Is she?” Raina said, amusement lacing her tone.

Blythe shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s why she and May were best friends.”

We thanked the girl and started walking down the road without a word between us. The sun was gone, only a bloody smear of light remained to silhouette the trees.

“Once we’re clear of town, we’ll ride. Nightmare can do two days in a couple hours.”

“We can’t show up at night like this,” I said, rubbing my arms for warmth. The heat of Last Hope was far behind me; the summer nights in this place were cooler with a promise of actual cold riding the light breeze.

“Let’s go up the road a bit and camp till daylight,” Raina said. I was surprised she didn’t argue.

My ears popped again as the Nightmare emerged from the deepening gloom. I wasn’t sure what supplies Raina had, or if Reapers even ate food anymore. Her lean, hard build told me nobody had been feeding her proper if she did.

Turned out Raina had a whole camp in those saddlebags. She pulled a bedroll from them, then a tin pot and cup, two cans of beans, and a hunk of smoked pork wrapped in waxed paper. She handed me my small pack and I fished out the blondies, nibbling one as I stood back and let her set up camp with the efficiency of a soldier. I lit the fire with a command after she made a pile of shavings for me, glad I could do one small thing.

“I have flint,” she said, a hint of a smile playing at her lips.

“It’s the most practical magic I know,” I said with a shrug. For a while as we got comfortable around our small fire and filled our hungry bellies, things were almost amicable. I stopped short of saying I missed this, because it was a tiny step from that to saying I missed her, and that was a scab I was unwilling to pick. Even if it was already oozing just from having her solid and real beside me.

“I didn’t ride far enough the last time,” Raina said as she watched me set the wards.

“We’ll find this Alice, tomorrow,” I said as I finished walking the perimeter of our camp, my saltbox in hand. There was nothing out here but trees and small critters that I could sense, but a ward never went amiss. I looked at the pallet of blankets and thick felted pad she’d laid out.

“We can share, or I’ll keep watch a while. I don’t require much sleep.”

That might have been a Reaper thing, but Raina had never slept well either. I couldn’t count the nights I’d awoken with her pressed against my back, holding me in the dark of night, not sleeping, just watching the patterns on the wall turn from black to grey to blue. Sometimes we’d made love, her hands wandering my body until I was ready for her to press inside, but usually I’d pretend I was still sleeping, letting her hold me as she kept an eye on the dark hours.

“Sharing is fine,” I lied. I was a grown-up, I could sleep next to someone and let the past be the past.

The fire banked, she lay down beside me, staying outside the wool blanket though I lifted a corner in offer. I closed my eyes and closed my heart, curling on my side away from her, trying to wish the night to pass.

“You ready to admit you might be wrong?”

“We doing this again?” I rolled onto my back and stared up at the shadow of her face as she leaned over me, her eyes like tiny blue stars. “Let it go. I’m here, I’ll see it through with you, but hearts can’t survive in pieces. I know what I know and I’m sorry I don’t know how to show you.” I wasn’t sorry. I worried the pain of knowing the truth would kill all remaining light inside her.

“You should’ve let me go after her. Hell, before all that you should’ve told her the truth about her asshole fiancé.”

The trouble with our daughter had started before she ran off, when she was fifteen and fell in love with a man ten years her senior. When we’d confronted him and told him he had to wait to marry our daughter, he’d asked for gold if we wanted him gone. I’d never let Raina tell Mairi the truth, preferring her angry at us for running him off than to let her live with a broken heart knowing her first lover played her false.

I closed my eyes as my nails bit into my palms. “She wasn’t a doll we could keep on a shelf. We did what we could to protect her once and she hated us for it. If we’d gone after her, we would have lost her forever.”

“If you are right,” Raina said, the words hard and cold in the dark beyond my eyelids, “we lost anyway.”

I said nothing because there was nothing left in me to say it.

We rode through the damp mist the next morning at blinding speed, only dismounting when we got to a sign telling us White Water was ahead. That final mile was walked in tense silence as well, neither of us feeling like fighting when a real answer might be over the next hill.

Blythe hadn’t led us wrong; Alice’s house was a pretty log cabin set among an explosion of blooms, many I recognized. A sweet hint of magic rode the air, so faint I nearly missed it and might have if it hadn’t been so familiar to me.

“Mairi,” I whispered, feeling the dance of her power on my skin. She’d used a lot of magic here, had a hand in this bounty. I practically ran down the path, Raina jogging behind me.

For a moment I believed in miracles; in that space between when I knocked at the door and it opened, I allowed myself to breathe in the scents of magic and life and to hope I was as wrong as I’d ever been.

Then the door opened and the woman who stood there had pale skin instead of brown, gold hair straight as straw instead of curls, and blue eyes instead of hazel. There had been no Alice in Mairi’s letters, but she’d often mentioned a woman a few years older than she was, calling her “Goldie.”

“Alice?” I asked.

“You’re Cassidy,” she said, wonder in her voice. “And Raina?” She looked behind me and her smile wavered. “You’d both best come in.”

We sat at her kitchen table as she bustled around offering us coffee until finally she settled. “You’re wondering about May? She spoke of you often and it’s easy to see the resemblance, that’s how I knew.”

“Your garden?” I said, not sure where to start. “Mairi, that’s May’s full name, she planted it?”

“She helped me with the seeds, did her witch thing, well, you know,” Alice said with a laugh. Then her face fell. “Did May send you here? Is she all right?” She looked between us, her eyes not quite meeting Raina’s.

“We haven’t heard from her in over ten years,” I said softly.

“She was coming home?” Raina folded her hands on the table.

“Oh.” Alice’s face fell and she took a deep breath. “She said she might. But then things went bad here and I figured she’d gotten on the train like she talked about. Lot of us did, after the carnival burned.”

I held up a hand to stop Raina from speaking. “Maybe you’d better tell us the whole story, Alice.”

She did, at first in halting, scattered sentences as though she wasn’t sure where to begin. She’d fallen in love with a man and planned to stay here in White Water since he worked on the trains all over but had family and land here. Her husband and her two kids were with their grandparents down the mountain a ways going fishing this week, which was why she was there alone.

She’d been an acrobat, dancing with the horses same as Mairi. Our daughter wasn’t happy with the carnival since the owner’s brother, Paulie, had arrived to help run it, but Alice wasn’t sure why Mairi hated the man. She speculated that he’d been making passes at our daughter but said that May wasn’t one to complain.

The trouble in White Water came when the main carnival tent caught fire, stalling them from moving on, though nobody was hurt. Then dynamite had been found on the tracks by the train bridge that crossed the Grand White River gorge.

“That was the last time I saw May,” Alice said. “That night. She said something about the train schedules, seemed real upset. I asked my husband later, he said that the payroll was due to come through early the next morning. There were a lot more people around back then, though the town was already draining on account of the mine being low.”

“Someone was planning to blow the tracks and rob the train?” Raina asked. She drummed her long fingers on the table and I reached out without thinking and stilled them with my own. I knew she wanted answers about Mairi, but people had to tell their story at their own pace.

“I think May knew about it,” Alice said. “She was acting weird that day and then she said she had something to do. After that I guess somebody left a note for the train marshal to check the tracks and that’s when they found it.”

“The marshal listened?” Raina raised her eyebrows.

“The note was wrapped round a stick of dynamite, so yeah, he listened. My husband, he was just an apprentice then, he saw it. Said the handwriting was real loopy, like a fancy woman might write.”

My heart began to dance inside my rib cage as a lump blocked my throat.

“That’s why you think it was Mairi.” Raina said what I couldn’t find the voice to.

“She went up the mountain and later that night the mountain came down. A section of the old mine collapsed, everyone said it was probably an accident, but the timing wasn’t too accidental. They dug for days but found no bodies. There’s an old lodge up there and the rock slide missed it by inches. Paulie bought it, still runs the place as a gambling hall.” Alice made a face. “He’s not likely to give you answers. Maybe you’re scary enough to make him.” She said that last to Raina.

“I’ll go and ask him,” Raina said, baring her teeth in a grim smile.

“The flowers keep blooming,” Alice said, her blue eyes fixing on my face. “Even in winter, right through the snow. That’s why I’d hoped that . . . that May was all right. But she isn’t, is she? Not if you’re here.”

I didn’t know what the flowers meant. We witches can learn the words and focus our will and pull the life force from inside ourselves, use the right materials to try to invoke the power we want to exert on the world, but sometimes the magic doesn’t work and sometimes it works in ways we’d never expect. Being a witch was more art than science. All I knew was that Mairi had left a piece of herself here, high in the mountains, in a garden overflowing with color and joy.

“I think I’d best go talk to Paulie,” Raina said, standing up.

“Follow the trail after the station, you’ll see the sign with the dice on it. I don’t know what he’ll have to say, though. Not much good goes up or comes down that mountain.”

“I’ll fit right in, then,” Raina murmured.

I followed her out of the house, waiting until we were alone outside before I said, “You didn’t say we.”

“That’s cause you’re not going with me.”

“Hell I’m not,” I said, hands on hips. “You said we’re seeing this through.”

“Something bad is here, Cass,” Raina said. “I smell the rot in the breeze. I don’t know what I’ll find up the mountain, but trouble is my job.”

So she’d used me to talk to people and now she was done, back on her crusade, leaving me to wait. I took a deep breath of the flower and magic around me, pulling its warmth into my chilled bones.

Raina dropped my bag at my feet and leapt up onto the Nightmare’s back, taking my silence for agreement. I could no more have stopped her riding away than I could hold the wind in my hands.

But I was done staying behind. I picked up my bag and started walking.

“Cassidy.” Alice’s voice stopped me as I reached the edge of the garden. “May saved a lot of people, you know. She probably saved my husband’s life. He would’ve been on that train. If it had gone down into the gorge, I don’t know how many would have died. Maybe all of them. I didn’t know if I should say anything since I didn’t want you going up there, but if you’re going to go anyway, well, Paulie and some of the muscle he always hung around with went up the mountain that night. He didn’t help with the search either, even though he was already at the old lodge.”

I turned to Alice but couldn’t manage a smile. “Thank you,” I said. “I think this garden blooms because she loved you and love doesn’t end, even when we’re gone.” I held out my hand and Alice put her palm in mine, her eyes bright as the summer sky with unshed tears.

“Be careful,” she said.

I let her go and turned to face the mountain.

Raina would get there ahead of me, but it didn’t matter. I was here, and I was going to see this through for the sake of my stubborn, beautiful wife and my stubborn, beautiful daughter. I was done waiting.

There was no sign of the Nightmare outside the lodge as I stepped out of the towering pines into a huge clearing. The signs of the rock fall were still evident in the large boulders and swath of treeless land cutting like a gash down the mountain. The lodge itself was a two-story log and stone building that had seen better days. Three horses were tied, untacked, to posts outside, their tails flicking lazily in the morning sun.

The silence warned me back, something unnaturally still and empty even though three live animals stood waiting patiently where they’d been tied. Not so much as a stick cracked to warn me as cold metal pressed to my neck even as I hesitated.

“How about you come inside, lady,” a low male voice said. “Drop the bag.”

I didn’t need magic to know that was a pistol at my neck. A number of small tricks I could try to get him away from me flashed through my mind, but I didn’t know if his finger was on the trigger or what startling him might accomplish, so I set the bag down, trying to bend away from the gun as I gathered power inside me.

The butt of the pistol came down on the back of my head and then the only thing going through my mind was nauseating pain and dancing red spots. He hit me again and I slumped, not quite unconscious but all the strength sapped from my limbs. I tried to struggle as he lifted me and half dragged me across the clearing, but a second, bigger man came out and grabbed my legs. Something wet trickled down my neck and I was sure it wasn’t sweat.

The main room of the lodge had a bunch of tables pulled to the sides with benches stacked on each other. The men dumped me in the middle of the room like a sack of grain and I struggled to my knees, tentatively feeling the back of my head between my braids. My hand came away bloody.

“Hello, little witch.” A man approached me, his posture and the way the four others followed him with their eyes telling me he was likely the boss. Paulie. I could see why our daughter hadn’t liked him. His face was narrow and mean with a pinched look that came from temperament and not breeding; his pale eyes were bloodshot and held no warmth. It was the hunger on his face that scared me the most, that and the spiky red aura around him that was like nothing I’d ever encountered before.

“You’re Paulie,” I said, the room swimming in and out of focus. I tried to stand but slipped down again.

“You look like her a bit, mother maybe? Your little bitch ruined my life. But I guess you are here to make it all better.” He chuckled and bent over me, gripping my chin so tight I felt my teeth shift.

“What did you do to my daughter?” I spit out, trying in vain to dislodge him.

I was too disoriented for magic, nothing but my own blood on my hands making them slippery as I clawed at his arm. Where in the cold hells was Raina? She should have beat me here. Rot filled my nostrils and heat traveled down my arms as Paulie’s aura turned to crackling rusty lightning.

“How about I show you?” His eyes bored into mine and a headache that had nothing to do with the blows I’d taken exploded between my ears.

The room swam and re-formed. The tables were gone, the walls bare of hangings and mirrors, the floor dirty with a layer of grime saying the empty place hadn’t been well-trafficked in years. Mairi stood right in front of me with a revolver in her hand, so real I could almost touch her, but when I tried my arms ghosted straight through. I heard Paulie laugh but it was a younger, less worn down and sallow version of himself who confronted my daughter, standing where I had been standing.

“They know, Paulie,” Mairi said. Her face was bruised, her lip swollen and bloodied, but her eyes were clear and focused. “You’re done. There’ll be no robbing that train, and there will be no leaving here, not for you.”

“You ain’t strong enough to hold me, baby witch. You should have minded your own business.”

“I know what you are, demon,” Mairi said, her words striking me to my soul where I hovered inside a memory not my own.

He moved so quickly it was a blur but she evaded him, flipping to the side, her head cocked as though she was waiting on something. A distant rumble filled the air, like thunder from a storm not yet arrived.

“With blood I bind you,” Mairi said, spitting her own blood at the demon.

He howled and came at her again, managing to knock the revolver from her hands as two other men closed in behind.

“With wind I bind you,” my daughter gasped as she forced the air from her lungs in a gust aided by her magic.

“Hold her down,” Paulie yelled in the memory as the men dragged my baby to the floor. The rumbling grew louder and with it the sound of kindling splitting and snapping. Trees caught in the rock slide, I realized.

Over this din, Mairi yelled the final words of the spell. “With earth and fire I bind you, demon.” Her blood, the power of the explosion she must have set before confronting him, it was enough. I felt what Paulie had felt those ten long years before as the spell found its target and iron bands of power locked around the demon, binding it to this place.

Only a Reaper could kill a demon and send it back to the underworld, but our daughter had found the next best way, trapping the demon in a body that would age and rot until Death could reclaim it.

Paulie’s memories skipped around as the demon exited my brain and I used that moment to grab hold to what I could, searching for Mairi in them, taking more than the demon wanted me to see. I saw her fate, what he’d done to her after the roar and tumble of earth and stone stopped. I saw too, just before he shoved me backward and his hand descended to strike my face, what he intended. He was going to try to take my body and walk free of Mairi’s spell with my witch powers.

“You’re going to fail,” I said to his gloating face. I spit blood at him, trying to summon enough sense and power to do anything. I had no salt nor my sacred wood and I’d never been as easy with magic without proper ritual as Mairi had, but I could always start a fire.

I spit again, using my rage and pain to fuel the flames of magic. My blood hissed like sparks from a campfire on wet wood as the droplets spattered the demon. Smoke trailed from his shirt. Orange flames flickered to life, then caught.

“Put it out,” the demon hissed as flames I’d conjured licked at his shirt. They leapt from him to the man next to him as my will directed. I struggled to my feet, knowing the magic wouldn’t last long.

This time when the man behind me tried to hit me with the butt of his gun, I was ready. Twisting, I slapped the gun to the side and launched myself into him. I got my hand around the revolver as we wrestled with the gun between us. He kicked my leg and I nearly let go, the barrel swinging back. Pointing straight at my chest.

Then the doors exploded inward and Death came to save me.

Raina flowed into the room like a river of steel and vengeance, her long body and sparking cold eyes an extension of the glowing blue blade in her hands. She cut through the two men in front of her without stopping before they even had a chance to reach for guns. Distracted by the arrival of his doom, the man I was struggling with let go of the revolver and I fell backward.

“No you don’t,” I said, pointing it at him as he tried to run. I recognized this man’s face from Paulie’s memories. He’d been there, he’d been one of the ones who dragged my daughter away.

Crackling lightning bringing a smell of ozone and rot flashed through the room and I ducked, clutching the gun. Icy flames met the hellfire, bursting in blue arcs from Raina’s sword as she clashed with the demon. They fought to a standstill, power against power, the demon moving too swiftly even for Raina’s deadly dancing blade. Desperate, I fired a shot that went far wide of either, but Paulie’s rage-filled face turned toward me for a moment at the burst of noise.

I raised the gun again, the metal heavy in my hand. The demon’s eyes flared with dull fire and I saw my end kindled in them.

Raina’s blade flashed, separating the demon from his head. For a moment, his body seemed to hover as his head collapsed in a smoking ruin. Then the rot and fiery red aura fled the room in a burst of cold that froze my breath into pale mist. Paulie’s body slumped with a thud, and left only silence in its wake.

I pointed the gun back at the cowering man, but my bloody finger slipped off the trigger as I stared into his fear-panicked eyes.

“Cass, give me the gun.” Raina’s gentle voice penetrated the haze of my mind. She pried the pistol from my ice-cold fingers.

“I saw her,” I said. “I know what they did to Mairi. I know where she is. He was part of it. He hurt our baby.”

“You’re no killer,” Raina said. She squeezed the trigger, the shot intensifying my already aching head as it cracked the heavy silence, leaving worse in its wake. The man’s body slumped to the floor.

“Help me up,” I whispered, not trusting my voice or my balance.

“I was waiting for nightfall to confront the demon,” Raina said. “Cassidy, when I realized, God I thought I was going to lose you forever.” She looked like she wanted to say more, but I clung to her arm and started pulling her toward the door.

“Let’s go get our baby.”

We found her up the mountain, Raina prying the boards off the old mine shaft I’d directed us to. They’d dragged Mairi here and chained her inside, then boarded it up and walked away.

Sunlight cast long beams into the small space, shining like a spotlight onto the grey-white bones jumbled at the base of a tarred and scarred length of wood. Her wrists were still in the manacles, the rusted metal holding them upright in a cruel parody of life, the bones of her hands laid as they would have been against the stone in supplication.

Mairi had died alone in the dark, struggling against the iron binding her, injured and drained of magic, slowly losing the battle with hunger and thirst and finally life. Locked in here, abandoned, her bones unmourned, her soul tied down by her tragic end.

Seemed that although she’d given up some of her humanity, Raina could still weep. We worked in silence, tears running down our cheeks, as we gathered our daughter’s bones into my bag, making sure to not miss a single one. Then we rode down the mountain, back to Alice’s garden, where she met us with concerned words and a flurry of help.

We buried Mairi there beneath the flowers her love and magic had seeded. As the earth was tamped down over her body, light that had nothing to do with the afternoon sun glimmered and formed a vague shape that became more and more solid as I clung to Raina’s arm, my tears flowing anew.

Mairi held out her hands to us with a smile on her face. Her ghostly lips formed words that I’d longed to hear and though no sound issued, I read them with my heart.

“I love you, too, baby,” I said, stepping toward her. Her hands were warm mist, light glittering on my skin.

“Mama’s going to take you home,” Raina said.

My ears popped and Alice gave a little shriek of surprise as the Nightmare stepped up beside Raina.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said when Raina’s gaze met mine. “Bring our baby to rest. I’ll catch the train.”

Raina sprang into the saddle and Mairi’s ghostly form leapt just as gracefully up behind her, glittering arms wrapping around Raina’s waist, mother and daughter long and lean and beautiful riding together one last time. Alice and I stood in the sunlit flowers long after the Nightmare and her riders had faded into the trees.

A week after I’d made my way home, I heard the creak of my porch steps. This time my heart wasn’t hollow and I went to the door, tossing the screen wide. Raina sat like a long shadow on my porch swing with her hat tipped down low over her cold fire eyes. Her sheathed sword leaned against the porch rail.

“I made cobbler,” I said, leaning against the open door. “If you want to come in.”

Raina unfolded from the swing and then cocked her head as though listening. My heart was pounding in my ears so loud that at first I didn’t hear it.

“Train’s coming,” she said.

“Train’s always coming. There’ll be another.” I held the door open and backed up over the threshold.

“You sure?” Raina said, and I knew though she was eyeing the physical distance between us, it was a different kind of space she was minding crossing.

“Come on in,” I said.

Raina dropped her hat onto the swing and shook down her hair, inky waves falling in shining curls that glinted ebony and silver in the sunlight. Then she stepped across the threshold and into my arms.