I spotted some lights, way back.
I said, “Someone’s behind us.”
“Turn right as soon as you can.”
I saw a decent road coming up, and I turned.
“First open area you see, park.”
We went a ways before I spotted a good place. The side of the road was open, both north and south, for about ten feet. Looked like there had been a small fire there that had gotten out of hand for a few minutes. I pulled over to the right.
“Go into the trees. If they try to kill me, shoot them all.”
Without a word, I grabbed my rifle from the back and took off running. Had the guns all ready, of course, and they were fully loaded. I always checked that first thing in the morning, if I hadn’t remembered to do it last thing at night. The sky was lighter by the minute. The sun was just up.
I found a good tree and scrambled up it so I could get some oversight. When I looked down, there was a sleeping black bear about ten feet away in a natural depression in the ground lined with old fallen leaves and pine needles.
I tried not to picture what would have happened if the bear had woken as I started up the tree. You never could tell with bears. Sometimes they did their best to get away from your area. Sometimes they charged. I had not been careful to be quiet.
I made myself forget the bear and sight through the Winchester on Eli, who had gotten out of the car to lean on the trunk. He wasn’t wearing his hat, and he hadn’t had time to tie his hair back, but at least today he was wearing real clothes. He did not look my way. After a moment I could hear the car coming up fast.
And then it skidded to a halt.
Three people piled out of it, two women and a man. The women were both redheaded, and though it was hard to tell in the light, I thought they were twins. The man was black. They were all wearing grigori vests, which settled that.
Eli had said that I had to wait to kill them until they tried to kill him. There was a long, uneasy silence among the four grigoris.
“Where is the woman? The gunnie?” The black man had a heavy accent. I couldn’t place it.
“I left her to make her way home,” Eli said. “You needn’t bother to look for her. You won’t find her. Why are you here? I did what I was sent to do.”
“We don’t believe you should have come at all,” said one of the women, her voice calm and confident.
“Why?” Eli sounded truly surprised. “This was the wish of our late tsarina, that people here should see a better way, that black people should be free. Kasper, you should understand that.”
The black man said, “There’s more to this than freedom, Eli. There are economic…”
“Oh, bullshit!”
I’d never heard Eli say that before.
Then he said, very clearly, “There is no point in waiting.”
That was clear.
The red-haired woman on the left raised her hand to fire some kind of power at Eli. It was too dark to be sure I had a killing shot, but I could hit her. I shot her and she went down. Quick as a wink, I shot the other woman, a gut shot. By that time, Kasper was running back to their car, and he was harder to hit. But I winged him in the right shoulder, and when he was on his way down I shot him again. Took care of him.
And the bear woke up, of course. It charged Eli.
“Get in the car!” I screamed, and by some miracle he made it into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind him. I didn’t want the car any more banged up than it already was, and I prepared to shoot the bear. I didn’t want to. It went against my grain to kill an animal I couldn’t eat.
And then a good thing happened. A deer, really a fawn, maybe startled by the gunfire, blundered into the clearing and ran for the other side.
The bear took off after it.
I didn’t question luck, good or bad. I was down the tree and dashing for the car. Eli leaned over to push open my door, and he took my rifle from me and put it in the back seat. When I was sure the bear wasn’t coming back, I took the grigori vests off the dead people and handed them to Eli. I had to shoot one of the women again; she wasn’t quite gone. I had to move their car, too.
Finally, we took off. The whole thing had taken maybe ten minutes, but it felt like a lot longer.
I kept driving until we had to stop for gas.
No one else came after us. Or if they did, they didn’t catch us.
We didn’t see Felix—or anyone else we knew—and we joined back up with the highway about thirty miles later. It was easier and faster driving, but it was also the road anyone searching for us would take.
We ate quickly in a diner in Texoma. Chicken-fried steak and the last of the summer squash and biscuits. I felt real glad to be in my territory. We were low on money, and that worried me along with about ten other things.
I began driving for Segundo Mexia. Eli didn’t say a word, yes or no. He slept a lot of the time. When he was awake, we didn’t do a lot of talking. But I was thinking as I drove, and the first night we turned to each other in bed—he mostly had to let me take the reins because he was so fragile—I had some questions afterward.
“Did you know Felix was going to do all that with the bones?” I still felt kind of hurt when I thought of it. I had believed the bones were alive, that Moses the Black was with us, and I was not much of a believer in anything. I hated Felix for doing his sorcery well enough to make me wonder, and I also thought the better of him for trying to do such a bold thing. And he had done it so well. I would sure like to punch him in the nose, though. Now that I’d brought him back to life.
Eli ran his hand across my stomach, up and down it, rubbing it and patting it. He really liked my stomach. He said, “What would you do if you thought I was running after someone else?”
That was a shocker of a subject change.
I started to give a teasing answer. Like, I’d shoot you first and her next. But I thought again. Eli had sounded serious.
“I would walk the other way,” I said. “I am too proud to try to hold on to a man who would treat me that way. I would tell you I wished you well, but for a while that would not be true. I would hate you. But in time, weeks or months, I guess… I would get over the worst of the pain. And I would hope someone new, someone better, would cross my path.”
“You would not hope that I would come back?”
That surprised me. “I would not take you back.” That was all there was to it.
“Why not?” He was dead serious.
Seemed so plain to me. “You did it once, you might do it again. I try to learn from my mistakes.”
“That seems almost… manlike.”
“Don’t you ever think women are always the ones who ruin relationships. If you stray, you deserve the backfire. I’ll tell you something. Dan Brick isn’t any more than a friend to me. But I know he would never do me that way if I took him on.”
Eli was silent after that, and I was glad. I had said my say, and I meant every word. I knew Eli must have some princess or a fancy rich woman to go back to. How could he not? And I knew when this little jaunt was over, he’d go back to the HRE. He’d probably get some title or medal for helping the black people of Dixie get some rights, since of course they’d want to join the church that had taken off their chains, namely the Russian Orthodox Church. And if all the blacks in Dixie joined the Russian Orthodox Church, and they began voting, they might think it was a good idea to be allied with the HRE. And if that alliance didn’t work, it had only cost the tsar some money and some expendable gunnies and grigoris. I knew the grigoris I’d killed had another point of view, but I could not imagine what that was.