Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier Read online

  “Ma’am?” I said, stepping up behind her.

  She dropped the chunk of cactus she was holding, whirling to face me. “I’m working as fast as I can,” she said, instantly defensive.

  I blinked. I’d been expecting irritation—having the foreman walk over when you’re doing your job just fine can seem like micro-management, and that’s something I try to avoid whenever I can—but there’s a difference between that and actual hostility. “I didn’t say you weren’t, ma’am,” I said slowly. “Joe just came to tell me you’d lost your gloves. We wouldn’t want to get thorns rammed up under your skin, would we? Makes it hard to work.” I kept my tone light, like I was just making conversation, but I was starting to worry. What kind of person clears cactus without gloves? Even I wouldn’t do something that stupid, and I’m pretty well known around here for healing too fast to use common sense before grabbing hold of the barbed wire. Cactus thorns sting, and they’re harder than hell to get loose once they’ve grabbed hold.

  “He shouldn’t worry, I’m fine,” said Celia, holding her hands out toward me, palms up. I leaned in to study them and blinked. There were no thorns anywhere in her skin. I’d seen her touching the cactus bare-handed—and saguaro isn’t a polite plant, it jams you with thorns just for looking at it funny—but you wouldn’t have known it to look at her. “I know how to pick up cacti without getting hurt.”

  “Pardon me for saying so, ma’am, but I’d be grateful if you could teach me that trick,” I said. “I get thorns jammed in my hands all the time.” And feet, and less socially acceptable places. Running the range isn’t a good way to stay smooth-skinned and cactus-free.

  “It’s an old family secret,” she said.

  “That’s as may be,” I allowed. “Still, you’re making the men uncomfortable. Would you mind putting on your gloves, please? Just until we’re finished here?”

  She gave me a smothering glare but pulled her gloves on, going back to hoisting cactuswithout saying another word. I decided discretion was the better part of valor and walked back toward Joe; he’d need to be talked down before I got any more useful work out of him.

  We were on our way back to the ranch, trucks loaded down with chopped cactus, before I realized what was really bothering me. Celia’s hands had been untouched. I’ve seen stranger things; far be it from me to complain about one of my workmen being able to avoid injuring themselves. But her sleeves had also been clean. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt like the rest of us, and there hadn’t been any thorns lodged in the flannel. I can believe an “old family secret” would protect hands, but clothes? Something wasn’t right there. Something was missing.

  When I got back to the bunkhouse, there was a ghostly calico sleeping on my pillow, and the sugar I’d left on the windowsill was gone. Tiny footprints led from the saucer to the window, and someone had tied all my socks into a vast, helplessly snarled knot.

  The pixies were spreading.

  Unknotting my socks took the better part of two hours. By the time I had them unsnarled, the sun was down, the mess hall was finished serving dinner, and I had an audience of a dozen spectral felines watching me. A coyote howled somewhere outside, a long, mournful-sounding note of invitation—Are you there? Can you hear me?

  Now there was a thought. Coyote eyes aren’t as cunning as human ones, but coyote ears and noses are better. Maybe that could help. Leaving my socks on the bed for the cats to sleep on, I climbed out the window and dropped to the ground, already starting to strip. When I was done, I pitched my clothes back through the window, leaving me standing naked in the night, looking out on a whole world full of possibilities.

  I knelt, stretched, and rose on four weathered paws. The view changed during the shift between forms, color becoming black and white, perspective tilted by my new height and the stretch of my muzzle. The smells more than made up for the loss of color, shining sharp and almost tangible in the air, like something you could reach out and grasp hold of. Assuming you had thumbs, that is.

  Tail low and nose to the ground, I trotted toward the barn.

  The smell of the stud bulls was the first thing to hit me, strong and musky and dominant. I resisted the urge to squat and mark this as my territory. We had a deal of sorts, me and the bulls, an unspoken pact of non-aggression. As long as I didn’t piss on what they considered their own, they wouldn’t trample me into the dirt when I was in my human form. Most of the crew thought that was the only shape I had, but pain can bring on an involuntary shift. There are explanations I never want to give, and that was one of them.

  Inside the barn, I could hear the bulls shifting uncomfortably, their hooves knocking hard against the ground. I kept sniffing, trying to filter their scents away, and was rewarded with the sharp, minty smell of pennyroyal. I followed the scent to the window and snarled when I saw the little leather posset someone had nailed there. There was a sweetness undercutting the mint: honey. Pennyroyal and honey over each window and door, all tucked into possets that lay almost flush to the wood, making them damned near impossible to see unless a body knew they were there. Someone was trying to attract the damn pixies.

  I circled the barn twice, fixing the location of each posset in my mind before shifting back to human. Naked as the night I was born, I grabbed a ladder and dragged it with me as I pulled every one of the cursed things down, heaping them in a pile just outside the territory the bulls considered to be their own. Then I gave in to instinct and pissed on the whole damn mess, dousing it completely. I kicked dirt over it when I was done, then shifted back to coyote form and trotted for my bunk.

  The cats were still in my bed when I got there. I hopped up among them, tucking my nose under my tail and trying to figure out what else I had smelled at the barn. Something was bothering me. I was almost asleep when I realized what it was.

  Everyone at the ranch had reason to be at the barn at one point or another; there was no one whose scent shouldn’t have been there. But Celia…

  I had smelled her much too strongly. She was up to something.

  I was still thinking of her when I drifted off to dreamland.

  The next night was more of the same: more pennyroyal possets over the barn windows, more signs of pixie mischief around the farm. Half the sugar had gone missing from the mess, and the damn things had plucked two of the best laying hens half bald. No one was getting any sleep, kept up well into the night by the sound of distant giggles.

  This couldn’t go on.

  When the third night was drawing near, the sun sinking low on the horizon, I was ready. I lurked around the back of the old outhouse, waiting for the sound of someone driving a nail. When I heard it—the steady, rhythmic pounding of a hammer—I bolted.

  I came around the corner of the barn at a dead run, set on catching whoever it was had turned cruel or foolish enough to be trying to attract pixies, and nearly ran headlong into Celia. She shrieked. It was the first honestly surprised sound I’d ever heard that woman make, but there wasn’t time to enjoy it. She made a little jerking motion with her right hand, and suddenly my entire face felt like it was on fire. I stumbled to a stop, raking my hand across my cheek, and came away with a palm full of blood and cactus spines.

  The sight of the blood made the smell of it register, bringing all the other scents around me into a sudden, unpleasantly sharp relief. The blood; the cows stabled so close at hand, and the sheep in their pens a little way off, with their wooly white bellies and their thin, thin skin; the sharpness of the mint that clung all around the barn. Celia’s perfume was an icepick in the mix, a spike of artificial violets and roses that made my head spin. My teeth were doing their best to get longer, pushing themselves out past the limits of the human norm. Blood does that to me.

  “What the hell did you just do?” I demanded. My changing jaw made the word into something closer to a growl. I swiped my hand across my face again, clearing away more of the blood and another palm’s-worth of cactus spines. The holes were closing, the blood slowing down. Thank the mi
dsummer moon that I heal fast. Otherwise, every little scratch would be an exercise in self-control that I don’t have the willpower for.

  “What are you?” she asked, eyes going wide. She raised her right arm to chest-height, the underside toward me. She was wearing short sleeves, I realized, and I could see the bristling lines of thorns she was readying to fling in my direction.

  I wiped my hand on my jeans and wiped my face again, counting backward from ten like Mama taught me. It was working, but slowly; it’s hard to resist the urge to change when there’s blood already in the air. “Ma’am, I think I’m within my rights to ask you the same thing.”

  “Are you some sort of...some sort of werewolf?” She kept her arm up, hand tensed back. I was starting to see what would happen if she twitched her wrist—I’d get another dose of thorns, and this one would be a lot more focused.

  “No, ma’am, and I’ll thank you not to call me that again. I don’t really hold with werewolves. Too high up the food chain for me.” I wiped the last of the blood and thorns on my jeans, adding, “I also wouldn’t hit me again, if I were you. I’ve pretty much got control of myself, but I can’t guarantee that’s going to last if you go and hit me again. I’d really rather not find out what you are by trying to eat you.”

  “I doubt you could,” she said, pride briefly winning the battle with frightened confusion.

  “Do you want to find out the hard way?”

  We stood there glaring at each other for a while. I knew pretty much what she was thinking; I’ve seen it before. There I was, scrawny Dusty Tucker, with blood drying on my cheeks, saying I wasn’t a werewolf. Either she wasn’t going to believe me and she’d run off to find herself a silver bullet—not that it’d do her a bit of good, but try telling people that when they’re sure they know what they’re doing—or she was going to back down and spill first, just to find out what I was. I was pretty sure she was going to do the latter. I look too harmless, even when I’m trying to force down a change in the middle of the day, to be anything a woman who can shoot thorns out of her arms needs to worry about.

  Finally, she dropped her arm, the thorns sliding back into her skin and disappearing, hey-presto. They didn’t even leave indentations behind. I was pretty sure that if I ran my hand along the place where they’d been, I wouldn’t feel anything but skin. Her camouflage was perfect.

  “Nice trick,” I said, genuinely admiring. Most folks with built-in weaponry at least flinch when they have to retract it.

  “I’m a saguaro dryad,” she replied. There was a note of challenge in her tone, and a whole lot of wariness in her eyes. She was expecting some sort of argument, I’m sure; being something that far off the beaten path makes a body a little wary about telling people. For every person who accepts you, there’s three more who won’t, and some of them can be dangerous.

  Well, if she wanted an argument, she wasn’t going to get it from me. “Is that so?” I asked, admiringly. “Well, I’ll be. That’s one I’d never have guessed. Never met a saguaro dryad before. Oak and elder, yes, and one little lady that was a field of dandelions in her off time, but never a saguaro.”

  “You’re not...you don’t have a problem with that?”

  “Ma’am, I’m a Tucker. We get sort of used to things being somewhat to the left of what’s considered normal. It comes with the territory.” I shrugged. “My mama drives a haunted truck for a circus that’s owned and operated by a genuine retired muse. After you’ve grown up dealing with that, just about everything else seems like the soul of normalcy.”

  Celia’s expression hardened somewhat, taking on a trace of its old arrogance. “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “No, ma’am, scout’s honor.” Not that I was ever a Girl Scout; we didn’t stay in one place long enough for that, and anyway, Mama never liked me getting overly friendly with the townies—nor the townies getting overly friendly with her children, and that always started to happen eventually. “I left the circus and came here when I decided I wanted to do something with myself that meant staying in one place. Needed a territory of my own, you could say.”

  “And you are...?”

  “I take after my daddy’s side of the family, ma’am. I’m a werecoyote.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then started to laugh. The sound was buoyant, almost infectious, but I stood my ground and watched her calmly until her mirth finally died down and she managed to say, “You can’t be a werecoyote. You’re too white.”

  “Believe me, ma’am, I’m fully aware of the color of my skin. I’ve got too much English blood in me to tan—I don’t even freckle in the sun. That doesn’t change what my daddy was, or the fact that I’m his natural-born daughter.” If there’d been any question in his mind when Mama sent him pictures of his blond-haired, blue-eyed baby girl, they’d died the day she sent him a picture of herself and my brothers sitting in the cab of the truck with a yellow-furred, blue-eyed coyote bitch. He wrote back telling her that he was glad to finally know he had a daughter, and that she wasn’t to write him again. Teaching me to survive was up to Mama—and me.

  “Well I never.”

  “If you’re quite done making fun of me, ma’am, and you’re not planning to shoot me full of thorns again, I’d be interested to know why you’ve been filling our stud barn up with pixies.”

  Celia blinked. “What? No. I’ve been trying to get rid of them. You’re the one inviting the nasty little things in.”

  “I most certainly am not. I’ve been trying to get rid of them as well.”

  “Then why are you hanging pennyroyal all over the damn barn?”

  “I’m not.”

  She stared at me. I stared at her. Finally, she passed judgment.

  “Well, hell.”

  One of the ghost cats rubbed against my ankle, leaving the faintest feeling of static behind. I stooped to pet it, noting the way Celia’s eyes followed the motion, not only of my hand, but of the cat itself. She could see it. That wasn’t too much of a surprise—most supernatural creatures can see the ghost cats—but it was somewhat reassuring to know. People often didn’t care to see what didn’t relate to them.

  I paused. “If you don’t mind, ma’am, I have an idea,” I said. “Can you turn all the way into a cactus?”

  “Can you turn all the way into a coyote?” she snapped.

  “Good,” I said. “I have an idea.”

  There’s things that turn invisible in the desert, so commonplace that they aren’t worth seeing anymore. Saguaro cactus, for example. It takes years on years for them to reach their full, towering height, but it only took Celia a few seconds to melt from woman into thorny plant, her body melding seamlessly into the thick green skin and bristling thorns. I stripped quickly, concealing my clothing behind her before shrugging off my own humanity.

  A cactus isn’t much of a surprise out here. A coyote that doesn’t run when someone comes walking by, now that can be more of a shock. I stretched out on the ground in front of Celia’s trunk, putting my head on my paws and trying to look like part of the landscape. Coyotes don’t normally do that sort of thing. Anyone seeing me would take me for a dog, or figure I was unwell, and either way, we’d have a little time.

  I settled in to wait. I assume Celia did the same. It was hard to tell, with her being a cactus and all. The shadows grew long around us, slowly blending into the darkness dripping down from the sky. Night made itself known. Still we waited, until the scuff of a foot in the dust caught my attention. I forced my head to stay down, ears swiveling toward the sound.

  Boss Jones came walking out of the shadows, a mint-scented sack slung over one shoulder, his eyes set on the stud barn.

  I was on my feet in an instant, running for him with a snarl in my throat. He shouted and fell back. I slammed into his chest, shifting back toward human, so that he landed on the ground with a naked woman on top of him. He shouted. I snarled again, and he was still.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded, as Celia ra
n up behind me. She was fully clothed. It wasn’t fair.

  “Dusty, what the hell—” he began.

  I snarled again. He went quiet. “Do you know how much damage pixies can do to livestock? Do you?”

  “They’re the reason you’ve had so much dead saguaro around here this season,” said Celia. “The little bastards have to go.”

  “I didn’t…they were supposed to bring in the tourists!” protested Jones. “They’re exotic! Something for the kids!”

  “And they’d make up for the rattlesnakes and the cactus and the scorpions?” I scoffed. “You’re a fool, and when I tell the owners, you’re a fool who’ll be gone.”

  His eyes went wide. “I’ll tell them! I’ll tell them you’re a dog!”

  I smiled, showing all my teeth. “What, you think they don’t already know?”

  He whimpered. This time, the scent of urine was not canine in origin.

  The owners were not thrilled to hear how their trust had been abused, and Boss Jones was sent packing, along with a sack full of his precious pixies. Some people deserve what life hands them. Celia celebrated the disappearance of the threat by spending three days dancing with her people in the high desert before returning to work like nothing had happened. She was still mulish and occasionally snappy, but we had an understanding now—one which seemed to extend to all the other saguaro in the desert. It’s been months since I’ve had to pull a cactus spine out of my nose.

  Like I said, my mama didn’t raise no fools. And it would be a damn fool of a coyote who left a ranch where the pay was good, the cacti were friendly, and there was always a dance to be had on a full moon night.

  4

  The Men with No Faces

  Alexandra Christian