The Bone Orchard (11 page)

Ambrose’s grin turned into a crooked smirk. The corner of his mouth was bleeding though. He coughed, doubling over and holding to the gunshot wound in his stomach. He fell to a knee, gasping for breath.

“Ambrose?” Ezra knelt with him, panic rising as he gripped Ambrose with both hands. “No, Ambrose. No, you can’t do this.”

Ambrose coughed again, grimacing as his strength seeped away. He reached for Ezra, his fingers trembling. “I love you,” he said quickly. “If I don’t come back . . .”

“No,” Ezra hissed. “No, you must.”

“Know I loved you a lifetime’s worth,” Ambrose gasped. “A lifetime.”

Ezra opened his mouth to respond in kind, but before he could get the words out, Ambrose was gone.

Ezra was too stunned to move for what seemed an eternity. Boone Jennings’s screams from below were drowned out by a buzzing in Ezra’s ears, by the echo of Ambrose’s last words.

“No,” he snarled, and pushed himself into action. He sprinted back to the Continental, fighting the panic in his chest, fighting the tears of mourning and loss that threatened. He didn’t even need the aid of a hotel guest to shove through the heavy hotel door, and tears streamed down his dirty face when he lunged into the saloon.

Ambrose was sitting at the bar, staring quizzically at his cigarillo. He turned to Ezra when Ezra stumbled toward him, and he barely found his feet in time to catch him when Ezra threw himself into Ambrose’s arms.

“I thought you were gone!” Ezra gasped.

“So did I, for a minute there,” Ambrose said with a grunt. “You got a light on you?”

With Jennings in the ground, Ambrose had half expected him and Ezra to move on to whatever step was next. It didn’t happen, though, not even after being shot with his own gun. So rather than lingering over the hows and whys, Ambrose was determined to make up for a lonely life by taking advantage of an afterlife with Ezra. They spent their days in what was usually an empty hotel room, telling tales of their lives, lying in bed, and making just enough mischief to perpetuate the myth of the Continental’s haunting.

Every night, they would walk to the gallows to make certain Boone Jennings remained in his dirt prison. Ambrose wasn’t sure when it happened, but at some point they got into the habit of holding hands as they made the walk. Then the walk became a stroll. And often the stroll would end with a languid kiss in the moonlight. Making sure they could still hear Boone Jennings screaming below the gallows grew less and less important, until they oftentimes forgot to check him at all on their nightly outing.

One day, though, an odd feeling settled into Ambrose’s gut as he and Ezra lay together. He spent the rest of the day counting down the seconds until the sun would set and they could head off for the gallows. As they walked, he didn’t take Ezra’s hand in his.

“Are you all right?” Ezra asked.

“Something’s wrong.”

“I gathered as much, yes. What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Ambrose admitted. “But something’s wrong.”

A stray dog raised its head as they passed and growled low in its throat.

“Hush up, now,” Ambrose said, and waved his hand at the mutt.

That only piqued the dog’s interest though, and it hopped up and bounded after them, barking and nipping at Ambrose’s heels.

“Quit it!” Ambrose shouted.

Ezra waved his bowler hat at the animal. “I’ve never seen this one before. I thought we’d been chased by all the dogs in San Francisco already.”

The dog’s teeth snapped loudly as it bit at Ambrose’s calf. Its muzzle went right through him.

Ezra laughed, but Ambrose was in no mood for this, not tonight. The wind kicked up, and a newspaper scrap blowing on the breeze rolled toward them like a tumbleweed. It caught on the dog’s foot, and Ambrose made to escape its attentions as it tried to get away from the paper. Ezra grabbed Ambrose’s arm, his grip almost painful as he jerked Ambrose to a stop.

“What?” Ambrose asked.

The dog’s teeth snapped again.

“The paper,” Ezra gasped. “The date.”

Ambrose managed to catch the printed words just before the dog gave up on them and turned away, letting the newspaper blow off. Ambrose’s entire body seemed to run cold. “We been dead ten years?” he blurted.

“My God.” Ezra met his eyes, stark fear in them for the first time since Ambrose could remember.

Such a passage of time, and they’d barely taken notice of it. They no longer needed to keep track of the day of the week, or the day of the month, or the day of the year. They didn’t feel the oppressive heat of summer or the biting cold of winter. They’d stopped paying as much attention to the living, to the changes around them. They’d lost all sense of time.

Without another word, they both turned to sprint for the gallows. If they had let time slip by so carelessly, what else could have changed? What else could have passed them by?

When they reached the courtyard, Ambrose had to fight the urge to be ill. The gallows were gone. Where they’d once stood was a new structure, a jailhouse, complete with bars and stone walls and a potbellied sheriff sitting beside a potbellied stove. And instead of the incensed screaming that had once come from beneath the dirt in the center of the courtyard, now they could hear laughter. Gleeful, evil laughter.

Ambrose stood rooted to the spot, horror and anger filling him. Ezra’s hand found his in the darkness.

“We knew this would happen one day,” Ezra said calmly. “We knew it, Ambrose. This is what we’re here for.”

Ambrose swallowed past the sharp bile of failure and nodded.

“This is our purpose. This is our price for being with one another.”

“And it’s a price I will gladly pay.” Ambrose kissed Ezra’s knuckles before releasing his grip and examining the new structures that seemed to have cropped up overnight. Ten years had passed. “We got work to do.”

They learned their lesson, and Ambrose made certain they never lost time again. It wasn’t easy, because sometimes their days and nights blended together. Some were happy and carefree, spent in each other’s arms, as if they could make love for days without caring about the world beyond. They paid for their time together, though, with what seemed like endless trials, battles that were bloody and grueling, weeks at a time spent foiling some plot of Jennings’s to take more lives for his bone orchard.

They spent many a waking hour devising new ways to rid themselves of Boone Jennings’s ghost, sometimes succeeding in trapping him for a short while, sometimes failing. He had haunted Ambrose in life, and now he pestered him in death. Their latest scheme had failed so spectacularly, even Ambrose had admitted that Boone Jennings’s laughter was appropriate this time.

He took a deep drink of his whiskey, rather wishing he could still experience the burn as it went down. He’d never felt so utterly defeated, not in his thirty-odd years of life, nor in his twenty-odd years of death.

“Sulking rather becomes you,” Ezra teased.

“Then stop trying to cheer me up.”

The jail had made it both harder and easier to wage war against Jennings. They were able to trap him in it quite often, what with the both of them being far stronger than he was alone. But because he’d been attached to the gallows and it was no longer there, it made him harder to pin down.

After tonight’s initial plan of action had gone up in flames, Ambrose had finally hit him in the head with a piece of wood and knocked one of his eyeballs clear across the room. They hadn’t been able to trap him, though, not this time. They weren’t strong enough to push that jail cell closed. It would have held the bastard until the sheriff opened the cell to throw some drunk in there, and that would’ve been long enough to make another attempt worth the effort.

They would simply have to try again after rebuilding their strength.

And that was how it went until they stopped counting the days, the months, the years.

As their bond grew stronger and the world around them changed, they began to anchor one another, taking strength from each other as well as from the places where their lives had ended. A night spent in Ezra’s arms made Ambrose feel like he could move mountains. It also helped him recover on the rare occasions when Boone Jennings wrestled his gun from him and shot him with the damn thing. It was the only thing that hurt Ambrose anymore, but Ezra’s touch could sooth even the most savage of pains.

Rather like the beating he’d taken tonight. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, and sometimes Boone Jennings knocked him on his ass and stomped on his face.

“You know you love knocking his eyeballs out, though.”

“I tried to step on it this time,” Ambrose said disconsolately, “but it wouldn’t quit bouncing.”

Ezra snickered, but he sobered quickly. “Ambrose. I think it’s time we acknowledge a truth we’ve both known for some time.”

Ambrose hesitantly met his gaze. Ezra’s expressive eyes were full of sorrow. “We’ll never be able to rid ourselves of him for good.”

Ambrose lowered his head, staring at the glass in his hand. “He told me, ‘You can’t kill the devil,’” he said on a sigh. “I reckon he was selling himself a little long, but he was right. In a sense.”

They couldn’t kill him. He was just as stuck and invincible as they were. But they could prevent his evil deeds, and they could slow him down.

Several nights later, it took both of them to shove the brand-new metal jail cell door closed and latch it, and it fully exhausted them to the point that Ambrose searched the Continental’s saloon for a light to his cigarillo for hours before realizing that Ezra wasn’t with him.

Jennings’s angry wails carried all the way to the Continental for weeks. It was a glorious stretch of victory. They grew restless and bored, though, until even banging the headboard in their room to perpetuate their haunting myth wasn’t enough to fill the days as they passed. When Jennings got free, they both admitted it was almost a relief. Neither of them did idle well.

Sometimes, after Ambrose and Jennings would grapple to the point that they exhausted themselves and were spirited back to their respective corners, Jennings would disappear for long stretches and leave them in peace. Ambrose often wondered if perhaps Jennings got lost somewhere between the real world and spirit world. There was nothing anchoring him here but rage, whereas Ambrose always came back right on time, with Ezra sitting on a barstool waiting for him with a smile. And when Ezra took his turn at Jennings, on the occasions when he lost, he always popped up right where he’d fallen, but the street had been turned into a courtyard with a fancy little fountain and a concrete bench for Ambrose to sit on and wait.

They always took advantage of those stretches when Jennings went missing by staying in bed as much as possible and watching every sunrise together. Their room, the now infamous Room 18 at the Continental, had gained quite the reputation for being haunted. Guests reported smelling smoke and gunpowder, feeling the mattress dip when they were trying to sleep, and seeing glimpses of a bespectacled man in a bowler hat, watching them in the mirror over the washbasin.

Ambrose and Ezra had a lot of fun terrifying some people, especially the ones who came in declaring they didn’t believe in ghosts, and that one man who’d walked in and ordered them to show themselves. Other guests they left alone. Ambrose had a soft spot for newlyweds, especially, and Ezra refused to do anything that might frighten a child.