Chapter 8

When Mikeos woke consciousness came sudden as a gunshot. He jerked up, almost standing before settling back in the chair that held him.

"What?" The pain had gone, his strength returned. The Doc sat behind his desk, Jenna in front of him, her head bowed, the veil of her hair hiding her face. "How?" Mikeos patted his shoulder. No tenderness, nothing.

"Blood magic." Jenna growled it. Always angry – the thought returned to him.

"I feel great." Mikeos stood, pushing the chair backward. He flexed his arm, wriggled his fingers. "Fast." Perhaps it was just contrast, having been so far gone along that last trail, and now whole and fit all of a sudden, but he felt he could run to the Five-Oh-Seven and beat the train there. He turned to offer the doc his thanks, then the words caught up with him. A shadow with them, the sudden feeling that he'd been caught in the middle of some shameful act.

"Blood magic?" He touched his forehead, half thinking for a moment to find a hex wound there. "You did it, Jenna?"

She looked up at him, hair streaked with grey falling to either side. A fine tracery of silver scars marked the place where her own wound had once gaped. Her flesh held a healthy glow, the faint beginnings of crowsfeet wrinkling at the corners of her eyes.

"She drank your blood, Mr Jones," the woodkin seemed to find great amusement in the fact. "And cured you both."

"Ignore him." She shot the doc a poisonous glance. "I set a drop of your blood here." She tapped the hex scars. "That's all. My powers will return in time."

Mikeos grinned. "I like you better this way."

Jenna offered him a dark look. Again that feeling of being somehow exposed, dirty. He pushed it away.

"But why? You said you wouldn't." Mikeos remembered her refusal, back in the shade of the sandthorn tree. "I guess I asked you to." He pursed his lips at that not liking how it tasted. "But getting killed is part of the trade – you didn't have to take me seriously."

Jenna rose from her seat too, fixing Mikeos with a level stare. "I mean to find Eben Lostchild, and you, son of Daveos, are going to take me to him."

"And what is it that you think Mr Lostchild can do for you, Jenna?" The kin's question made Mikeos flinch, Jenna's eyes had drawn him so far in he'd forgotten the doc was even there. The fact Jenna startled too made him feel better about it. Together they turned toward the doc, slowly, both hearing the change in the kin's voice, now a curious multi-tone as if a hundred spoke in close harmony.

"Eban is humanity's warrior, a hero who can defeat the sect," Jenna said with grim satisfaction.

It seemed to Mikeos that the kin's eyes were a lighter shade now and more grey than green. "Eban had his own magic," he told the doc. "Something all his own. Not hex-work. More powerful. That's how my Pa told it."

"Had?" The kin tilted its head in question.

"Has," Jenna said.

"And is it worth so much to you? This magic?" the doc asked. "Enough to upset the balance of a thousand years? To throw aside the gun-law, the protections our sister set around you? Do you so hunger to meet the Stranger?" None of his homely ways, no Ansos accent now, or jokes, just a curiosity somehow more distant than any corpser's hunger.

"How long have you lived, doctor?" Jenna asked.

"Five hundred and—"

"And in all that time you never took a name, doc? You were just the doctor."

"I never saw the need."

"Maybe when you do see the need, you'll understand us better." And she turned away, brushing past Mikeos on her way out.

Mikeos picked his hat from the desk where it rested and set it on his head. "Much obliged, doc."

"And do you know why you're going, Mikeos? Why you want to find the Eben Lostchild?"

"Reckon I'm just following the girl, doc." Mikeos reached up to thumb his brim in farewell and turned for the door.

"And when Eben tells you why you shot that horse, Mikey, what then? What then, Mikey?"

The kin spoke the words to his back and Mikeos' shoulders ran cold with them. He paused in the doorway, not looking back. "You don't know us at all, kin." And he followed Jenna down the hall to the front door and out into the blaze of the day.

He caught the hex-witch at the corner of the street. "To the station?"

She nodded. "Let's go home."

Mikeos fell in beside her, stealing glances, still taken with the novelty of Jenna in skin-tones rather than in shades of hex-pale.

"What?" Jenna returned his scrutiny. They turned into the main street, kicking dust, stepping over wagon ruts.

"Nothing." Mikeos looked away, scanning the rooftops, the blank eyes of widows above the shop fronts. In truth if a man with a rifle wanted to take him then the odds were with that man. But perhaps the Stranger had run out of employees in Ansos, or at least ones ready to take pot shots at the town's 'slinger. Either that or the secret laws by which the gods played their games said poor Mikey had had enough for the day.

"Hey!" Mikeos stopped in his tracks.

"What?" Jenna scowled at him. It looked like she had caught the sun on her forehead already.

"Thought you said I'd forget about Lilly and the others the moment you stopped telling me?"

She shook her head and stomped on. "Blood magic. It shares. I shared my strength with you."

Mikeos caught up with quick steps. "And what did you get?"

"Your weakness." She spat in the dust. "And your habit for spitting, apparently." A note of disgust in her reply.

The evening crowds thickened around the station. Stalls selling fake hex trinkets, water sellers carting barrels, street barbers, Mr Golosh selling candy canes and sugar apples under an oversized parasol in pink and white that somehow resisted the pervasive dust, everything a pilgrim or traveller might want before approaching the first pillar. The station roof rose above it all. At some pillars you might have to trek a mile or three into the badlands to find a track and wait in the dust and heat for your train. Others, like Ansos, had platforms, with overhanging roofs for shade and shelter, pillared and defying the years. Few stations were as grand as Ansos' though, with six tracks converging beneath an arching roof of cast iron and opaque glass panes, and almost always a train waiting, bound for somewhere, ready to take away Ansos and replace it with any one of a six hundred other little islands of humanity in the unwelcoming vastness of the world.

Ticket Joe waited by the grand entrance, bent over his desk in the shade of the wall. You got your ticket on the train of course, but what Ticket Joe didn't know about the running of the rails wasn't worth paying for, and what he did, was.

"Wanting the Five-Oh-Seven, Joe." Mikeos laid a dime before the old man.

"You got choices." Joe covered the coin with four finger-bones wrapped in wrinkles. Mikeos had never been entirely sure the man wasn't half corpser. "'Rocket's waiting on the southbound platform, leaves in an hour. She'll take you to the One-Two-Six, change there for the Five-Oh-Seven, the Tuskeegee will take ya, but it's a two day stop over. Oklahoma will come through here at midnight, you can get that but it's four changes in a day to reach the Oh-Seven. Or The Wayne will take you direct, a five-hour haul, but he doesn't pull out until tommora. Early. Ten after five."

"The Wayne." A gunslinger stepping off at any pillar was apt to find trouble. "The direct route ."

Jo wrote them out a 'ticket', spelling out the time, name, and platform in slow, trembling script, dipping his steel nibbed pen twice, blotting once.

"Thanks, Joe." Mikeos scooped it up and turned back to Jenna. "We should stay at the pillar."

Jenna narrowed her eyes, her mouth pursed into what Mikeos' ma would have called a cat's-bum, at least when she wasn't too high on dust to call anything anything. "My sisters will have too many questions." She tapped the healed wound on her forehead. "I'll take a room in town."

"Best stay together then." Mikeos grinned. "Town ain't proved too friendly of late!"