Wild Country

CHAPTER 5

Firesday, Sumor 27

Already out of sorts because Prairie Gold’s post office was still closed, Abigail Burch returned to her little shop and felt a dissonance so severe she began to shake.

Where had that come from? She had to find it before it unraveled the protections that had kept her safe for the past three years.

She approached the bison-scented jar candles on the display table. What had sounded like a good idea, using free bison fat instead of buying tallow from Floyd Tanner, had turned out to be a spectacular failure. Even the Wolves didn’t want to use the darn candles and they liked the smell of bison! And now that nothing could be wasted, she had to keep trying to unload the things on Prairie Gold citizens who took pity on her. At least there weren’t that many candles to sell.

A chill ran through her. There had been a dozen jars on the table when she’d left. Now there were six more.

Abigail stepped away from the table. This shouldn’t be happening. Couldn’t be happening. Nothing she’d done when she’d gone through the steps to turn bison fat into candles could account for this dissonance. Except . . .

She hadn’t counted the number of jars. She’d thought she’d made more than a dozen, but when she came back from a lunch break and didn’t find any more, she figured she’d been mistaken. Now six more candles were on the display table and they . . .

Damn you, Kelley. What have you done?

It was possible that Kelley had found the other candles stashed in the workroom they shared and put them out on the table before going to his meeting with Jesse Walker. It was possible he hadn’t noticed anything wrong with them.

Kelley was pretty clueless about a lot of things, taking everything and everyone at face value. How else could she have played him so well for the past three years?

She’d needed a patsy to help her get farther away from her father and the plans he’d made for her, and she had found the perfect mark. When Kelley had found her drunk in an alleyway and had paid for a room at an inn and then stayed with her through the night, listening to her tearful story about the abusive father she had run from when she was seventeen, and how she’d been on the run for the past two years, she knew she had him. He wanted to help a damsel in distress, was ready to fall in love with a sweet, simple girl who just wanted a happy life with him.

She was many things. Simple and sweet weren’t among them, but it was a persona she had perfected for her part of the cons she had played with her uncle. At fairs or outdoor markets, they would have a booth where he would swap genuine stones and replace them with glass while doing a minor repair on a piece while she distracted the mark with her sweet patter about lucky stones and how she could choose just the right one for that person. And she could choose exactly the right stone for a person. That was her particular ability. But she could, and usually did, choose a stone that created a dissonance that would bring that person just enough bad luck when they gave in to an impulse and sat down for a game of cards with her father, whose persona was a frontier gambler.

Finding out that Kelley was a goldsmith and worked around gemstones was an unexpected and unpleasant hitch in her plans since she needed to avoid any stones that might dilute the energy of the stones she kept with her to deflect bad luck and create prosperity, but when he said he loved her and wanted to get married, she’d agreed—with some conditions.

They had moved three times in the three years they were married, finally settling in Prairie Gold last summer. She’d worried about living in an Intuit town, but everyone bought into her persona because Kelley had bought into it. Sometimes she was so bored with Kelley and this life she wanted to scream, but her father would never come to a small Intuit town in the middle of nowhere, and that meant she was safe from him—and safe from the other one. So she wore the old-fashioned dresses and read tarot cards and made candles and soaps that her neighbors bought out of kindness—and avoided getting close to the stones Kelley kept in his half of their shared workroom.

But now there were these candles, this dissonance.

The door to her little shop opened.

Abigail forced herself to smile at Rachel Wolfgard. “Good morning, Rachel.”

“Good morning.” Rachel eased into the shop, each cautious step bringing her closer to the table with the defective candles. “Jesse is having a meeting at the store. She told me to take a break and visit a store I haven’t seen yet. I have not been in your store. You sell candles and soap. The terra indigene use those things when we are in human form.” She reached for one of the jar candles.

“No!” Abigail shouted, certain everything would be ruined if those candles left the shop.

Rachel leaped away, startled. “I wasn’t going to steal. I have money—wages—to buy human things.”

As soon as Rachel moved away from the display, Abigail felt she could breathe again. She raised one hand in a placating gesture. “I knew you weren’t going to just take it. But those candles are defective. They shouldn’t have been put out for anyone to buy. I can show you other candles.”

Rachel backed toward the door. “No. I don’t need one.”

Shelley Bookman, the town’s librarian, walked in. Rachel turned and fled, dashing into the street. Shouts and the squeal of brakes.

“Gods!” Shelley said, standing in the doorway. “Phil Mailer almost hit her. Jesse should talk to her about the proper way to cross the street.”

If she’d taken one of the candles, Phil wouldn’t have stopped in time.

Shelley closed the door and walked over to the display table.

Abigail found it hard to breathe. A dissonance in someone else’s life wouldn’t have produced this effect. This only happened when a dissonance threatened to bring something dark into her life.

“You still have some of those bison candles?” Shelley said the words with the same forced enthusiasm as someone being fed marginally edible leftovers for the third night in a row.

“Don’t!” Abigail shouted when Shelley picked up one of the jars. She grabbed the jar and threw it on the floor with enough force to break the thick glass. “You can’t have that one. It’s not right for you! It’s not right!” She grabbed another candle and smashed it on the floor. “They’re not right!”

The third jar didn’t break, so she went into her workroom, rummaged through her box of tools, and returned to the display table with a hammer. Air burned her lungs as she picked up each jar and set it on the floor. Then she swung the hammer hard enough to break the jars. Swung the hammer over and over and over.

Had to stop the dissonance, had to protect herself. Had to . . .

The hammer mashed through the candle, revealing something inside besides the wick. Using the hem of her dress, Abigail dug it out. A tumbled stone no bigger than her thumbnail. Quartz.

Heedless of the glass, she mashed the other broken candles and found more tumbled stones. Agate. Jet. Carnelian. Hematite. Turquoise. They could have been good stones for someone else, but they were bad stones to be around her.

“Gods above and below, Abby.” Kelley stood in the doorway that connected his shop with hers, staring at her. “What are you doing?”

She twisted to face him, felt a shard of glass slice her knee. But she didn’t feel pain. Not from the glass. She felt rage at this boring fool who had torn a hole in her defenses.

“How could you do this? How could you?”

“I thought . . . Just something extra. A little surprise when someone burned the candle. You didn’t have to touch the stones. You dislike my work so much, I’m surprised you even realized there were a few tumbled stones missing from the bowl in my shop.”

I knew they were in the candles. I could feel them.

Kelley hesitated, then walked over to her. He took the hammer and helped her to her feet.

“You’re bleeding.” He sounded sad—and there was something else in his voice she didn’t recognize. Something she didn’t like.

“I’ll help Abigail clean those cuts,” Jesse said as she stepped into the shop. “You clean up the glass.”

Kelley nodded.

Remembering who she was supposed to be, Abigail didn’t protest when Jesse took her arm and led her to the washroom at the back of her shop. It didn’t surprise her that Jesse would show up, but she asked the question anyway. “Why are you here?”

“Because Rachel came running back to my store, too scared to make much sense, followed by Shelley, who said you were having some kind of fit,” Jesse replied sharply.

When had Shelley left? When she’d gone into the workroom to find the hammer? Or had Shelley fled after she started smashing the candles? She hadn’t noticed, couldn’t remember.

“Sit.” Jesse pointed to the closed toilet. Opening the daypack that was now so much a standard part of Jesse’s attire that people barely noticed it, she pulled out the first-aid kit and a bottle of whiskey. Pouring two fingers into the water glass Abigail kept on a ledge above the sink, Jesse held it out. “Down in one.”

“I’m not supposed to drink,” Abigail whispered. “I promised Kelley I wouldn’t drink.” Of course, Kelley had believed she’d been drinking hard for two years before he found her and doing some bad things to pay for the drink, so her giving him that promise had meant a lot to him.

“We’ll call this medicine. If he has a problem with that, he can talk to me.”

She downed the whiskey. Funny how it didn’t taste as good as the sips she took on the sly when Kelley was gone for an afternoon and wouldn’t notice.

Jesse said nothing while she washed the cuts and applied antiseptic ointment and bandages. She put everything back in her daypack before she leaned against the doorframe. “You scared Rachel so much she ran into the street and almost got hit by a car. That was unkind.”

Stupid Wolf should have been run over. No, don’t think that way. Sweet, simple Abigail wouldn’t think that way.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I sense people. It’s how my Intuit abilities manifest themselves. But I’ve never been able to get a good feel for you. We’ve always thought you were a sweet girl and a bit simple, dressing up in those long dresses women wore in my grandmother’s day and making your soaps and candles. But you’re not simple, are you, Abigail? That’s how you’ve chosen to hide and is as much of a costume as the clothes.”

Bitch. She’d always known one mistake around Jesse would end the game, but she had to keep trying to work the con until she found a way out. “I’m not bright. Never was. Everyone said so.”

“When you and Kelley showed up last summer, looking for a place to live and a place to work, we made room for you. Intuits have always tried to make room for their own, since we often can’t survive in towns run by humans who see our gifts as threats. I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to live in such a small place. He’s a goldsmith with a lot of talent for creating beautiful pieces of jewelry. He wasn’t going to get much work from the rest of us. Nobody here is rich enough to buy what he creates. But he wasn’t the one who wanted to live in an isolated place like Prairie Gold, was he? You’re the one who wanted—or needed—to live in a place where no one would think to look for you.” Jesse smiled grimly. “I never got a sense of you, Abigail. Until now.”

It sounded like a threat.

Jesse pushed away from the doorframe. “You and Kelley have some things to talk about. Then you and I will talk.”

“About what?” Abigail asked, pretending she didn’t know.

Jesse walked out of the washroom, letting the question hang in the air.

Abigail sat in the washroom for a minute—or maybe an hour. She didn’t know. Her body remembered the feel of a strap across her back when she’d messed up somehow and given a mark a stone that would bring good fortune. And she remembered the fear that had filled her just before she made the decision to run. She couldn’t go back to that. She wouldn’t.

But today Kelley had seen a moment of who she really was—and so had Jesse.

Jesse reached the sidewalk in front of her own store when Phil Mailer, who was not only the editor of the Prairie Gold Reporter but also ran the combination post office, telegraph office, and business center, called to her and ran across the street.

“Is Rachel all right?” Phil looked pale. “Gods, Jesse. She ran right in front of me. I almost didn’t stop in time.”

“But you did stop in time,” Jesse said. “She didn’t come to any harm.” Not physically, anyway.

“Thought she knew enough not to run into the street like that.”

“I’ll talk to her.” She’d be talking to a lot of people today.

“Don’t want Morgan or Chase to think I was careless with one of their own. Especially . . . Well, you know.”

She did know. Rachel wasn’t old enough yet to be looking for a mate, but she was the only surviving female of the Wolfgard pack who would be old enough in the next year or two to mate and have young. The two dominant Wolves would never forgive the humans in this town if one of them injured—or may the gods help them, killed—the young Wolf. “I’ll explain it to them.”

She walked into the general store. Rachel turned away from the shelf where she’d been stocking dry cereal, her amber eyes still full of fear.

“Does Abigail have rabies?” Rachel asked. “We know about rabies. It’s a dangerous sickness.”

“She doesn’t have rabies.” Jesse kept her voice matter-of-fact. “Her body isn’t sick. But something upset her and she behaved badly.”

“She didn’t want me to touch the candles she made.”

“She didn’t want Shelley touching the candles either.” She knew they were alone, but she made a show of looking around the store. “Where is Shelley?”

“She said she was going home to change into clean underpants, but I didn’t smell any pee or poop.”

So hard to keep a straight face when the girl said things like that. “That was an excuse to go home for a bit until she calmed down. Abigail scared her too.”

“It’s better to be around pack when you’re scared.”

Setting her daypack on the floor, Jesse gave Rachel a hug. “You’re right about that.” She stepped back and picked up her pack. “Can you look after things out here? I need to make some calls and handle some paperwork.”

“You need to call Tolya Sanguinati,” Rachel said. “He said I didn’t need to fetch you, but you should call him as soon as you were done with Abigail.”

Jesse went to her office, which wasn’t more than a corner of the back room that had been sectioned off with partitions and a long curtain that was usually tied back but took the place of a door when she needed some privacy. She turned on the lamp and stared at the phone.

Part of her wished she could send a direct e-mail to Steve Ferryman, the mayor of an Intuit village located on Great Island. But there wasn’t direct access to anyone in the Northeast Region. Probably just as well. She wasn’t in charge of Bennett, wasn’t the leader. Whether Tolya Sanguinati chose to resettle the town was his choice, not hers.

Tolya had taken over the mayor’s office as his workplace, so she dialed that number.

“Tolya Sanguinati.”

How many people felt a chill when they heard “Sanguinati”? “It’s Jesse. Rachel said you called.”

“Yes.” A beat of silence. “We have been fortunate that the young humans who have come to Bennett to assist in sorting the possessions of the former residents have been cautious around the terra indigene. Adding too many humans too quickly might cause . . . tension.”

“Might provoke your new sheriff or his deputy into biting first and asking questions later?”

“That too, but I was more concerned about the Elders and whether they would see a town full of humans as an . . . invasion.”

Jesse braced her head in one hand. The Elders had killed every man, woman, and child in Bennett a few weeks ago. They could, and would, do it again if the humans weren’t careful. “We still need more people to sort through possessions; we need people to try to find the heirs of anyone who left a last will and testament. There’s a need for people to work the ranches.”

“I don’t disagree, Jesse Walker, but I have discussed the possibility with Virgil Wolfgard of more humans settling in Bennett, and we agree that the Elders will not react well to there being more humans than terra indigene living in the town.”

“More Wolves working in the stores?”

“No.” Tolya’s voice held regret, reminding Jesse that he had known Joe Wolfgard, the previous leader of the terra indigene settlement near Prairie Gold. “No, there aren’t enough Wolves left who are willing to work around humans. Virgil and Kane are here because the rest of their pack was lost. There was no reason for them to remain in their old territory. Other forms of terra indigene would come to fill the empty spaces, learn human kinds of work.”

“Forms as deadly as the Wolves and the Sanguinati?”

“Yes.” Tolya waited, then asked, “Do you still want me to inquire about arranging for more humans to come to Bennett?”

Did she? Bennett’s population had been contained by the boundaries of the land leased to humans and, equally, by the amount of water the terra indigene had been willing to include as part of that lease.

“Let me review my list again. I truly believe we need to populate Bennett, but doing it in stages might be a wiser way to go about it.”

“Very well. I will wait to hear from you.” Tolya hung up.

Jesse set the receiver in the cradle and leaned back. She felt strongly that she was making the right choice for Prairie Gold, but she didn’t know if she was making a choice that the people coming to Bennett could survive.

When Abigail came out of the washroom, the glass had been swept up and the floor cleaned of any residue left by the candles she’d mashed. Kelley stood in the doorway between their two shops. When they’d first arrived in Prairie Gold, they’d taken whatever had been available for work space and a place to live. They couldn’t afford to pay for two shops, so they’d divided the display space of one by putting up a wall and doorway. The back room, which was a common workroom, hadn’t been separated. Didn’t need to be. She’d stayed away from his half of the room.

“I’m sorry I upset you,” Kelley said, staying in the doorway. “That wasn’t my intention.”

“I know that. Kelley—”

He held up a hand, cutting off her words. “When I asked you to marry me, you had conditions, one of them being that we live in a small town, the smaller the better. So we ended up here. Can’t get much smaller than Prairie Gold. This place suits you. You make your soaps and candles and don’t think about how we’re barely getting by.”

“We’re doing okay.” She ignored the way her heart started pounding in her chest.

“Because I repair jewelry people already own and make a few inexpensive pieces people can buy for gifts. Mostly we get by because I do odd jobs for anyone who needs an extra pair of hands and pick up enough money to pay our bills and buy the food.”

Abigail blinked as if blinking back tears. “Do we need more?”

“I do.” Kelley looked away. “Yeah, Abby, I do. I’m a goldsmith. I love working with gemstones and metals. I don’t mind giving my neighbors a hand when it’s needed, but I do mind that I can’t do the work I love. Especially now.”

Why now? She knew why. That moment when she’d stopped playing sweet Abigail and lashed out at him had shattered the illusion, had been the moment when his Intuit abilities had kicked in and he realized he’d been played.

“They need someone to take over the jewelry store in Bennett,” Kelley said. “They need someone to evaluate all the jewelry from the houses, do an inventory. In exchange for doing that work, I’ll be given the store, which has a workshop in the back where I can make my own designs again. I told Jesse I’d take the job.”

“What? How could she offer that to you? How could you accept without talking to me?” Play the part. If you don’t let the persona crack, you might still convince him it was just a flash of anger and not a revelation. “When did you tell her?”

“I called her while you were in the washroom.”

Damn it! If she hadn’t lingered in the washroom she could have stopped him from calling, or at least delayed his decision until she could figure out what to do. What she couldn’t do was stay here on her own. Now that Jesse had twigged to her not being what she pretended to be, she couldn’t play sad, sweet Abigail who was bewildered by Kelley leaving her.

For a moment, she considered whether she could hook Tobias Walker and live on the ranch, but making that play would give Jesse even more of a reason to examine everything she said and did from now on. No, she needed to get as far away from Jesse Walker as she could, and now that meant leaving Prairie Gold.

“Can I come with you?” she asked in a small voice.

He hesitated. That wasn’t good. Finally he said, “It’s Bennett, and there will be all kinds of folks there. It’s the sort of place you wanted to avoid before.”

“But everything is different now. A new start for both of us.” She took a step toward him. “An adventure.”

Another hesitation. “I think you should do what’s best for you now, and I’ll do the same.”

Kelley stepped back into his own side of the building and closed the door.

Abigail ran back to the washroom. Clutching the sink, she let the angry tears fall.

Damn Kelley for putting those stones in the candles! If he hadn’t done that, there wouldn’t have been that one revealing moment.

No choice now except to go with him to Bennett. Maybe, once they were away from Prairie Gold, she could reverse the effects of the dissonance at least until she figured out what to do.