“Yancy Logan. Thanks for the assist.”
“Glad we were in the neighborhood. Are you in charge?”
He took off his hat, dragged his fingers through the mop before he set it back in place. “I might be, seeing as they killed Sam Tripper, who more or less was.”
A woman stepped out behind him with a wailing baby on her hip. Fallon felt a quiet power from both of them. “You’re welcome here. Yancy, she’s The One.”
“Okay, honey.” He blew out a long breath. “I guess we should start cleaning up this mess out here.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They burned twenty-two PW bodies and three from the settlement they called Bright Valley. Fallon worked with a healer on wounded, both friend and foe.
She tended last to the knuckles of the woman who’d run out to use her fists on a downed PW.
“I don’t think we’d have held them off if you hadn’t shown up, so thanks. I’m Ann.”
“Ann. You’re welcome.” She glanced over as Yancy’s wife—Faith, half-Apache on her mother’s side, Fallon remembered—brought her a mug of tea. “Thanks. I gave some balm to Wanda, your healer. You should use some a couple times a day for a day or two.”
“They feel fine now.”
“The balm will keep it that way. I noticed you’re mostly women and children.”
“Out of a hundred and fifty-six—sorry, fifty-three now—we have fifty-five men over eighteen. We haven’t had much trouble before.” Faith handed Ann another mug. “Small groups of nomads or Raiders, but nothing like today. We thought we were ready, but we weren’t.”
“We got complacent,” Ann decided. “I haven’t seen a PW raid since I got here.”
“How long ago?”
“Almost five years now.” Ann, a small, diamond-shaped scar on her left cheekbone, flexed her healing knuckles. “We got hit by one outside of Reno, and had to run for it. I had my sister and little brother—not blood, but heart.”
“I understand.”
“Well, we got out. Lost everything but what we could carry and ran for it.”
Fallon heard the bitterness, understood the pummeling fists. “Sometimes you fight, sometimes you run.”
“My brother got horses. He’s got a way with horses and animals altogether.”
“An animal empath. My youngest brother—blood and heart—is the same.”
“Then you know. We rode south, and ended up here. Bright Valley, it’s a good place, with good people.”
Ann paused, rubbed both hands over her face. Her voice wavered. “Sam, I want to say Sam was a real good man. One you could depend on, and everybody here…”
She dropped her hands again, straightened her shoulders. “He’s going to be missed. People around here aren’t bloodthirsty, but they’re going to want to hang the ones who killed him that aren’t already dead.”
“Yancy will calm everybody down,” Faith predicted with a steadiness that rang with truth. “He’s got that way.”
“If anybody can, Yancy can.”
Faith smiled at that, then the smile died away. “But I don’t know what in hell we’re going to do with them. Where we’d put them, how we’d deal with them.”
“We’ll take them.”
“Where?” Ann shifted her attention back to Fallon.
“I’ll explain, but we need to talk to the prisoners.”
“Yancy’s got Sal watching them. They’re tied up tight in the sheriff’s office—Sam’s office. Sam,” Faith said and pressed her fingers to her eyes for a moment. “We don’t have a jail, but they’re tied up, and Sal won’t let them pull any crap. Ann, can you take her? I’m helping ride herd on the young ones.”
“Sure, I can.”
They went out of the small building into the street, where blood still stained the ground. But people worked to board up broken windows or led horses back to a town paddock. She signaled to Travis and Meda.
“Will he lead?” she asked Ann. “Your Yancy?”
“I’d say he and Sal will help run things, as much as they’re run. Yancy’s quiet, but he’s nobody’s fool. And Sal doesn’t take crap for certain.”
They walked to a box of a building with two chairs on a narrow porch. Inside, the prisoners sat on the floor, bound hand and foot.
Sal had her booted feet on the desk while she sipped whiskey. She’d been a redhead once, Fallon noted, as streaks of ginger still wound through the gray of her long braid. Like Yancy, she wore a cowboy hat, hers tipped down over her forehead. And a gun belt with a pistol rode on her narrow hips.
“Hey there, Ann, how are those knuckles?”
“Just fine now. This here’s Fallon Swift, and—sorry, I didn’t get the other names.”
“That’d be young Travis and Meda. Had my ear to the ground,” Sal added. “I’m pleased to meet you. Maybe a little sorry you figured you should heal up these assholes, but pleased just the same.”
“It’s easier to talk to them if they’re not bleeding.”
“Got nothing to say to you, devil whore.” One, black-bearded, potbellied, spat on the floor. “Or any of your like.”
“Oh, I think you’ll have plenty to say.” Tapping her fingers on the hilt of her sword, Fallon circled the bound men, arranged back-to-back on the floor.
The potbellied one wore boots with toes as pointy as needles, a fancy flag—red, white, and blue—sweeping up the sides. And soles worn so thin they showed holes at the balls of the feet.
She decided to start with the youngest—bearded as well, but scraggly, patchy. He wore a faded denim jacket that carried a poorly embroidered PW AND PROUD! on the back.
He’d taken an arrow in the hip, and though she’d healed it, she hadn’t taken the pain. She imagined it ached like fire.
He couldn’t have been older than Ethan.
“What’s your name?”
“Ain’t got nothing to say to you, whore.”
She gave Travis a glance, then crouched down to stare eye to eye. “I can smell your fear.”
“Fuck you.”
“You follow Jeremiah White.”
His eyes, a faded blue, held hate as well as the fear and pain. “He’s gonna wipe you and your like off the face of this earth.”
“How many have you killed? How many women have you raped in your quest for purity as defined by Jeremiah White?”
He twisted his mouth into a sneer that helped dampen any pity for his pain. “Many as I could.”
“You tell her, Ringo.”
She glanced to her left, to the bald man with a grizzled gray beard.
“Really? Ringo?”
“He goes by that,” Travis said easily, “because it makes him feel badass. His name’s actually Wilber.”
“Looks like a Wilber,” she said as he shot a wide-eyed glance at Travis. “I’m going to call you Wilber. Where’d you come from, Wilber? Where’s your base? How many in your base?”
“Fuck you, whore!”
“Excuse me.” Travis nudged by Ann, walked over, slammed a fist into Wilber’s face. “Call my sister a whore again, I’ll pull your guts out through your broken nose.”