Wasteland King (29 page)

This time, she caught him in the neck. This time, he fell.

The stranger landed in the dirt and popped right back up into a crouch. The slice in his neck looked like the first carving in an undercooked roast, but the blood was slurry and smelled like rotten meat. And the stranger was sneering at her.

“Girl, you just made the biggest mistake of your short, useless life.”

Then he sprang at her.

There was no way he should've been able to jump at her like that with those wounds, and she brought her hands straight up without thinking. Luckily, her fist still held the sickle, and the stranger took it right in the face, the point of the blade jerking into his eyeball with a moist squish. Nettie turned away and lost most of last night's meager dinner in a noisy splatter against the wall of the barn. When she spun back around, she was surprised to find that the fool hadn't fallen or died or done anything helpful to her cause. Without a word, he calmly pulled the blade out of his eye and wiped a dribble of black glop off his cheek.

His smile was a cold, dark thing that sent Nettie's feet toward Pap and the crooked house and anything but the stranger who wouldn't die, wouldn't scream, and wouldn't leave her alone. She'd never felt safe a day in her life, but now she recognized the chill hand of death, reaching for her. Her feet trembled in the too-big boots as she stumbled backward across the bumpy yard, tripping on stones and bits of trash. Turning her back on the demon man seemed intolerably stupid. She just had to get past the round pen, and then she'd be halfway to the house. Pap wouldn't be worth much by now, but he had a gun by his side. Maybe the stranger would give up if he saw a man instead of just a half-breed girl nobody cared about.

Nettie turned to run and tripped on a fallen chunk of fence, going down hard on hands and skinned knees. When she looked up, she saw butternut-brown pants stippled with blood and no-spur boots tapping.

“Pap!” she shouted. “Pap, help!”

She was gulping in a big breath to holler again when the stranger's boot caught her right under the ribs and knocked it all back out. The force of the kick flipped her over onto her back, and she scrabbled away from the stranger and toward the ramshackle round pen of old, gray branches and junk roped together, just barely enough fence to trick a colt into staying put. They'd slaughtered a pig in here, once, and now Nettie knew how he felt.

As soon as her back fetched up against the pen, the stranger crouched in front of her, one eye closed and weeping black and the other brim-full with evil over the bloody slice in his neck. He looked like a dead man, a corpse groom, and Nettie was pretty sure she was in the hell Mam kept threatening her with.

“Ain't nobody coming. Ain't nobody cares about a girl like you. Ain't nobody gonna need to, not after what you done to me.”

The stranger leaned down and made like he was going to kiss her with his mouth wide open, and Nettie did the only thing that came to mind. She grabbed up a stout twig from the wall of the pen and stabbed him in the chest as hard as she damn could.

She expected the stick to break against his shirt like the time she'd seen a buggy bash apart against the general store during a twister. But the twig sunk right in like a hot knife in butter. The stranger shuddered and fell on her, his mouth working as gloppy red-black liquid bubbled out. She didn't trust blood anymore, not after the first splat had burned her, and she wasn't much for being found under a corpse, so Nettie shoved him off hard and shot to her feet, blowing air as hard as a galloping horse.

The stranger was rolling around on the ground, plucking at his chest. Thick clouds blotted out the meager starlight, and she had nothing like the view she'd have tomorrow under the white-hot, unrelenting sun. But even a girl who'd never killed a man before knew when something was wrong. She kicked him over with the toe of her boot, tit for tat, and he was light as a tumbleweed when he landed on his back.

The twig jutted up out of a black splotch in his shirt, and the slice in his neck had curled over like gone meat. His bad eye was a swamp of black, but then, everything was black at midnight. His mouth was open, the lips drawing back over too-white teeth, several of which looked like they'd come out of a panther. He wasn't breathing, and Pap wasn't coming, and Nettie's finger reached out as if it had a mind of its own and flicked one big, shiny, curved tooth.

The goddamn thing fell back into the dead man's gaping throat. Nettie jumped away, skitty as the black filly, and her boot toe brushed the dead man's shoulder, and his entire body collapsed in on itself like a puffball, thousands of sparkly motes piling up in the place he'd occupied and spilling out through his empty clothes. Utterly bewildered, she knelt and brushed the pile with trembling fingers. It was sand. Nothing but sand. A soft wind came up just then and blew some of the stranger away, revealing one of those big, curved teeth where his head had been. It didn't make a goddamn lick of sense, but it could've gone far worse.

Still wary, she stood and shook out his clothes, noting that everything was in better than fine condition, except for his white shirt, which had a twig-sized hole in the breast, surrounded by a smear of black. She knew enough of laundering and sewing to make it nice enough, and the black blood on his pants looked, to her eye, manly and tough. Even the stranger's boots were of better quality than any that had ever set foot on Pap's land, snakeskin with fancy chasing. With her own, too-big boots, she smeared the sand back into the hard, dry ground as if the stranger had never existed. All that was left was the four big panther teeth, and she put those in her pocket and tried to forget about them.

After checking the yard for anything livelier than a scorpion, she rolled up the clothes around the boots and hid them in the old rig in the barn. Knowing Pap would pester her if she left signs of a scuffle, she wiped the black glop off the sickle and hung it up, along with the whip, out of Pap's drunken reach. She didn't need any more whip scars on her back than she already had.

Out by the round pen, the sand that had once been a devil of a stranger had all blown away. There was no sign of what had almost happened, just a few more deadwood twigs pulled from the lopsided fence. On good days, Nettie spent a fair bit of time doing the dangerous work of breaking colts or doctoring cattle in here for Pap, then picking up the twigs that got knocked off and roping them back in with whatever twine she could scavenge from the town. Wood wasn't cheap, and there wasn't much of it. But Nettie's hands were twitchy still, and so she picked up the black-splattered stick and wove it back into the fence, wishing she lived in a world where her life was worth more than a mule, more than boots, more than a stranger's cold smile in the barn. She'd had her first victory, but no one would ever believe her, and if they did, she wouldn't be cheered. She'd be hanged.

That stranger—he had been all kinds of wrong. And the way that he'd wanted to touch her—that felt wrong, too. Nettie couldn't recall being touched in kindness, not in all her years with Pap and Mam. Maybe that was why she understood horses. Mustangs were wild things captured by thoughtless men, roped and branded and beaten until their heads hung low, until it took spurs and whips to move them in rage and fear. But Nettie could feel the wildness inside their hearts, beating under skin that quivered under the flat of her palm. She didn't break a horse, she gentled it. And until someone touched her with that same kindness, she would continue to shy away, to bare her teeth and lower her head.

Someone, surely, had been kind to her once, long ago. She could feel it in her bones. But Pap said she'd been tossed out like trash, left on the prairie to die. Which she almost had, tonight. Again.

Pap and Mam were asleep on the porch, snoring loud as thunder. When Nettie crept past them and into the house, she had four shiny teeth in one fist, a wad of cash from the stranger's pocket, and more questions than there were stars.

Blood Call

Trailer Park Fae

Roadside Magic

Wasteland King

The Iron Wyrm Affair

The Red Plague Affair

The Ripper Affair

Working for the Devil

Dead Man Rising

The Devil's Right Hand

Saint City Sinners

To Hell and Back

Dante Valentine
(omnibus)

Night Shift

Hunter's Prayer

Redemption Alley

Flesh Circus

Heaven's Spite

Angel Town

Jill Kismet
(omnibus)

The Hedgewitch Queen

The Bandit King

Strange Angels

Betrayals

Jealousy

Defiance

Reckoning

“She's a brave, charismatic protagonist with a smart mouth and a suicidal streak. What's not to love? Fans of Laurell K. Hamilton should warm to Saintcrow's dark evocative debut.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Saintcrow's amazing protagonist is gutsy, stubborn to a fault and vaguely suicidal, meaning there's never a dull moment.… This is the ultimate in urban fantasy!”

—
RT Book Reviews
(Top Pick!)

“Dark, gritty urban fantasy at its best.”

—blogcritics.org

“Nonstop rough-and-tumble action combined with compelling characterization and a plot that twists and turns all over the place. Saintcrow… never fails to deliver excitement.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Loaded with action and starring a kick-butt heroine who from the opening scene until the final climax is donkey-kicking seemingly every character in sight.”

—Harriet Klausner

“Lilith has again created a vibrant, strong female heroine who keeps you running behind her in a breathless charge against forces you just know you would never be able to walk away from completely unscathed.”

—myfavouritebooks.blogspot.com

“This mind-blowing series remains a must-read for all urban fantasy lovers.”

—Bitten by Books

“Saintcrow scores a hit with this terrific steampunk series that rockets through a Britain-that-wasn't with magic and industrial mayhem with a firm nod to Holmes. Genius and a rocking good time.”

—Patricia Briggs

“Saintcrow melds a complex magic system with a subtle but effective steampunk society, adds fully fleshed and complicated characters, and delivers a clever and highly engaging mystery that kept me turning pages, fascinated to the very end.”

—Laura Anne Gilman

“Innovative world-building, powerful steampunk, master storyteller at her best. Don't miss this one.… She's fabulous.”

—Christine Feehan

“Lilith Saintcrow spins a world of deadly magic, grand adventure, and fast-paced intrigue through the clattering streets of a maze-like mechanized Londonium.
The Iron Wyrm Affair
is a fantastic mix of action, steam, and mystery dredged in dark magic with a hint of romance. Loved it! Do not miss this wonderful addition to the steampunk genre.”

—Devon Monk

“Lilith Saintcrow's foray into steampunk plunges the reader into a Victorian England rife with magic and menace, where clockwork horses pace the cobbled streets, dragons rule the ironworks, and it will take a sorceress's discipline and a logician's powers of deduction to unravel a bloody conspiracy.”

—Jacqueline Carey

Barrow-wight:
Fullblood Unseelie wights whose homes are long “barrows.” Gold loses its luster in their presence.

Brughnies:
House-sidhe; they delight in cooking and cleaning. A well-ordered kitchen is their joy.

The Fatherless:
Robin Goodfellow, also called Puck, the nominal leader of the free sidhe.

Folk:
Sidhe, or clan within the sidhe, or generally a group, race, or species.

Ghilliedhu:
“Birch-girl”; dryads of the birch clan, held to be great beauties.

Grentooth:
A jack-wight, often amphibious, with mossy teeth and a septic bite.

Kelpie:
A river sidhe, capable of appearing as a black horse and luring its victims to drowning.

Kobolding:
A crafty race of sidhe, often amassing great wealth, living underground. Related to goblins, distantly related to the dwarven clans.

Quirpiece:
A silver coin, used to hold a particular chantment.

Realmaker:
A sidhe whose chantments do not fade at dawn. Very rare.

Seelie:
Sidhe of Summer's Court, or holding fealty to Summer.

Selkie:
A sealskin sidhe.

Sidhe:
The Fair Folk, the Little People, the Children of Danu.

Sluagh:
The ravening horde of the unforgiven dead.

Tainted:
Possessing mortal blood.

Twisted:
A sidhe altered and mutated, often by proximity to cold iron, unable to use sidhe chantments or glamour.

Unseelie:
Sidhe of Unwinter's Court, or holding fealty to Unwinter.

Wight:
“Being,” or “creature”; used to refer to certain classes of sidhe.

Woodwight:
A wight whose home or form is a tree, whose blood is resinous.