She Returns from War

TEN



A gunshot. Victoria's eyes snapped open. She remained where she was, holding her breath, waiting to see if the danger had passed. As the rolling thunder of the Winchester faded into the desert, the sound of Cora's voice became distinguishable somewhere behind her.

Another shot shook the night air. Pulling herself into a sitting position, Victoria looked toward the sound. The hunter stood some distance off, a shadow in the dim moonlight, her rifle trained on something

Victoria couldn't see. She could still hear Cora speaking to someone. Was it her? She opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again. If Cora wasn't speaking to her, calling out might distract the hunter. Victoria's gun belt lay next to her bedroll. Pulling the revolver from its holster, she cradled it in both hands and watched.

Cora's form moved through the scrub. Even in the faint light, Victoria could make out the half-crouch of a predator stalking its prey. The old woman was clearly after something, but whether it was one of their unholy opponents from the night before or just another rabbit to add to the pot, she wasn't sure.

Next to her, the fire had burned low. A few flames still licked the charred wood, but they produced little heat and even less light. Victoria looked around for the pile of wood she and Cora had collected, thinking to build the fire back up so she could see better. The chill of the desert night was sharper than she had expected; her arm shook with it as she reached for a branch.

Something was watching her.

It wasn't human, but that didn't mean it wasn't a threat. The American frontier was as full of deadly animals as it was of ungoverned men. Her fingers tightened around the revolver's grip.

After a few minutes of staring one another down, Victoria's hand completed its trip to the woodpile. She grabbed the first piece of kindling her fingers touched and tossed it onto the fire. Two more sticks, and the fire began burning eagerly. Victoria kept her eyes on the animal, ready to raise her gun and pull the trigger if it so much as inched toward her, but it remained where it was. In the light from the growing fire, she could make out a head with small, triangular ears attached to a long body. She took it for a cat at first, but it seemed too large.

A report from Cora's rifle made her jump. The shadow flinched as well, its head turning toward the sound. Victoria stole a glance in the same direction, but her ears already told her that the sound was farther away. The hunter's quarry was taking her farther out into the darkness. The thought made her nervous, but she shrugged it away. Whatever was out there, animal or monster, Cora knew what she was doing.

The sound of fur hissing through the brush broke into her thoughts. She inhaled sharply as she brought the gun up. Step by step, the animal was making its way toward her. It kept its head low, a predatory stance, and Victoria took that as her cue to center the revolver's barrel on its head.

The creature halted its advance. A furry ear twitched. It stood no more than ten feet away, yet she still couldn't see its face. This close to the fire, she expected to at least see the gleam of the flames in its eyes, but she could only make out the vague shape of a long, slender muzzle. The gun trembled in her grip. She forced her hands to steady it. It was only a fox, a creature her father and his colleagues hunted for sport. It had far more to fear from her than she had from it.

"What you got there?"

Victoria spun in place, bringing the gun around. Cora ducked to one side, raising her free hand. "Mary mother of God, girl. I ain't no spook."

The air left Victoria's lungs in a rush, and her gun arm fell to her side. "Don't do that."

"Ain't got to be so damn jittery," Cora said. "What's got you so wound up, anyhow?"

Victoria looked back to where the fox had been, but the animal had vanished. "There was a fox over there. I thought it might attack me."

Cora howled a laugh at the night sky. "So you was planning on blowing his little fox brains all over the desert with my gun?" she asked. "Wouldn't have done you no good if you had. Ain't no meat on a fox that's fit for eating unless you got nothing else."

"I wasn't going to shoot it for food," Victoria said, rising to her feet. "I just didn't enjoy the thought of a wild animal tearing me to bits is all."

"Let me tell you something, Vicky."

"My name is-"

"If you got yourself ate up by a fox, you'd deserve it," Cora said. Stepping over to the fire, she hunkered down. It snapped in reply. "Ain't never seen nobody get ate by a fox while they was alive, you follow? You was scared for nothing."

"Yes, well, forgive me if my knowledge of the wilderness is somewhat incomplete," Victoria said. "I haven't exactly spent the best of my years traipsing around the back country."

"Ain't nobody perfect," Cora said. She pulled her rifle back out of its scabbard and laid it beside her bedroll. "Now, why don't you go have yourself a turn at keeping watch? I aim to get at least a wink or two before that old sun comes rolling on back up."

"What were you chasing?" Victoria asked.

The hunter looked up at her. "Thought I saw that blueeyed bastard skulking around out there, but I think my eyes was just playing tricks on me."

Victoria's gaze grew hard. "What? You're expecting me to keep watch by myself when he's out there somewhere?"

"Keeping watch is easy," Cora replied. "All you got to do is yell if he jumps you." Before Victoria could protest, Cora rolled away from her and promptly began snoring.

Victoria sighed and shook her head. Tossing another piece of wood onto the fire, she started searching for a tolerable place to hold her vigil. The desert landscape offered precious few choices, but she finally found one atop a flat stone not too far from the camp. Brushing it off as best she could, she sat down and set her gaze outward into the desert.

Soon, she began to wish her vantage point was closer to the fire. The night air greedily sucked warmth from her arms and legs, and the slightest breeze was enough to make her shiver despite her coat. She stomped her boots on the ground. She opened and closed her fists. She twisted her back around, first one way, then the other. Finally, she stood and stretched her arms. Nothing worked.

To pass the time, she imagined she was a fox herself, running through the endless desert, searching for field mice and other things to eat. Her thick grey coat would keep her warm as she bounded beneath the stars, smelling the sweet breath of the slumbering wilderness.

Above her head, the stars grew dim for a moment.

The ground passed beneath her in a blur. She could hear the rushing of the wind, but the air was not cold on her face. Pausing to look about herself, she saw the light from the fire in the distance, an orange pinprick of light among the sea of blue shadows. It seemed so far away.

A presence flickered through her mind. Somewhere out there, she could sense her fox, but something was wrong. It felt different, unclean, not the pure simple instinct and cunning she felt from the other animals around her. She turned toward the unclean feeling, and suddenly she was moving again, flying over the desert floor like a swallow skimming a lake's surface before a storm. The fire disappeared behind a hill as she moved, but she found she could see perfectly well without it. Light from the waning moon outlined the shape of every rock and plant she passed.

Voices.

She stopped, her feet hovering above the ground as if she were floating in water. Yes, there were people speaking somewhere out in the darkness, and they were nearby. Feeling no fear, she moved toward the sound, following it to the base of a cliff. The voices drifted down from above her. Grasping the stone wall before her, she found she could easily pull herself up along it. Higher and higher she climbed, her body as light as a cotton sheet.

Pulling herself over the edge, she held still for a moment. The voices were much nearer now. There were two, a man's and a woman's, and she recognized both. For the first time, a vague sensation of fear passed through her. The presence of the fox, dark and unnatural, loomed large in her mind. Alighting on the sandy rock beneath her, she willed herself forward, step by step, toward the voices and the presence both.

As she drew near to the far edge of the mesa, she could see two figures standing upright in the moonlight. Moving as close to them as she dared, she stopped to listen.

"You really ain't all that bright, is you?"

"My intention was not to harm her."

"Then why did you have me distract the old woman? Just so you could go have a peek?"

"The young one is as dangerous as the old, but she does not know her power. I had to be sure she has not yet awakened to that knowledge."

"That sprout ain't no threat. I would have had her body and soul both if the other bitch hadn't showed up. She talks big, sure, but she's just a kitten behind them guns and such."

"You speak in ignorance, demon."

"Ain't the first time."

"Victoria Dawes is-" The woman fell silent. Her eyes gleamed. "She is here."

The Indian's red gaze shifted from her companion, sweeping the barren rock for signs of the intruder. When her eyes swept over her, Victoria shuddered.

The woman took a step toward her.

Victoria backed up.

The woman advanced again, her eyes passing over Victoria but not seeing her. She sniffed the air. "She is very close."

"You're out of your gourd, woman. Ain't nobody here but us."

"Be silent." She took another step. "She is here and not here. Her power has stirred inside her."

The woman cast off the blanket covering her body. As before, she was naked save for a fur mantle wrapped around her throat. She crouched and bowed her head, fingers splayed out on the rock. The edges of her figure blurred in the moonlight. Her black hair faded to the grey of old ashes. Her body grew smaller. Ears sprouted from her skull. Her nose stretched forward and her eyes sank backward.

In the space of a heartbeat, the Indian witch had vanished, and a grey fox stood in her place.

Wonder filled Victoria, but it turned to terror as the fox's eyes settled on her. The creature broke into a run. Before she could react, it leaped at her, teeth bared.

Victoria jumped to her feet. Her cold limbs ached at the movement, but she could barely feel them. Her head swung this way and that, searching for the fox-that-wasnot-a-fox, but it was nowhere to be seen.

Behind her, something snapped. Spinning around, gun in hand, she took aim at the sound. The campfire burned cheerfully back at her. Beyond it, Cora still lay wrapped in her blanket. Seconds ticked by, marked by the frantic rush of her breathing, but nothing stirred. The dark presence of the witch was gone from her mind.

Slowly, Victoria allowed herself to relax. The revolver's barrel drifted downward as she sat back down onto her perch. Her head spun. She massaged her temples with her free hand, trying to sort reality from what surely must have been a dream. A fever dream brought on by the long day she had spent walking through the desert, back bent beneath the sun's wrath. Her brain had roasted like a honeyed ham in the heat, and now it was playing tricks on her.

She couldn't shrug off how real it had felt, though. The sensation of flying over the hard-packed desert soil, the coolness of the rocks beneath her fingers as she climbed up the mesa, the voices of their two adversaries as they held their council; if dream it was, it was the most vivid one of her life. Even the dreams she suffered as a child did not possess the same level of clarity this one did, even if they had frightened her more.

Victoria rubbed her arms. Until her parents died, she hadn't given those dreams a second thought since childhood. Even now, they still held some power over her, but such was the case with all childhood fears. No amount of rationalization could rid one of that deep-seated, primal terror of the unknown, the stranger, the dark. Facing them as a child was better, in a way. When she woke from her dreams, frightened and crying, her mother was always there with whispered comfort and a cool cloth for her forehead. Sitting there in the desert, alone but for the sleeping form of a half-mad gunfighter, she was swept up by a sudden longing for her mother's face and soft white fingers.

A chorus of screams rose up in the night, giving her a shock. Eyes wide, she brought the Colt up, ready to fire if the fox so much as poked an ear out of hiding. The cries echoed off the nearby cliffs and rolled through the brush, eerie in their near-human voices. Despite herself, Victoria imagined a legion of fork-tailed imps creeping in the shadows around her, laughing and calling to each other as they encircled the camp. Once planted, the fear grew inside her with alarming speed, threading its black tendrils through her ribs. Panic clutched at her throat. The cries drew nearer. She drew her revolver, pointing it this way and that at echoes and shadows. They were all around her.

She saw a shadow move and fired. The Colt's voice roared into the night, cutting off the eerie cries. Victoria blinked, blinded by the muzzle's flash. When the gunshot stopped ringing in her ears, the desert was silent.

"What is it?" Cora's voice, thick with sleep, broke the silence.

"Nothing," Victoria replied. Holstering her revolver, she turned back toward the campfire. "Just thought I saw something."

"Well, don't go wasting my bullets," Cora grumbled as she rolled toward the fire.

"I'm sorry," Victoria said, but the hunter's eyes were already closed.

Tossing a few sticks onto the fire, Victoria sat by the crackling flames and crossed her legs. Beyond the ring of light, the desert slept beneath its blanket of shadows. She breathed a sigh and looked toward the stars.