Then squeeze my face and try not to kill me.
He wouldn’t budge until she gave it a try. She sat there an hour before even attempting it. Eventually she did and was able to squeeze his face without crushing his skull or pinching his skin between the gears. They practiced every day until she learned how much pressure to apply to each situation. But that was a long time ago, she thought. He didn’t even trust her enough now to let her see his face.
“I’m sorry for teasing you, Alley,” she said as she started to slip back into the abyss of sleep. She touched his hand with her copper one. And though she didn’t hear his reply, she knew when he didn’t pull away that she was forgiven.
Eleven
The next morning they packed and were on their way. To get to the cabin, they had to first get back onto the wagon trail. An hour later Westie started to develop blisters in places blisters had no place being. She put her bedroll beneath her, but it was no relief.
“Are we almost there?” she asked. Though it had been only two years since she’d gone with Bena searching for the cabin in the woods, Westie had no idea where they were. It was before she’d struck her deal with Nigel, so she hadn’t been entirely sober during that trip. “I don’t think I can sit in this saddle much longer.”
“Almost,” Bena said.
They veered off the wagon trail again into the woods when Westie finally saw something she recognized. Little figures made of braided twine hung from the branches in the trees ahead.
Those dolls had been there when she’d traveled to the cabin with Bena, but not when her family had crossed through that part of the forest. Perhaps if they had been, things would’ve turned out differently. Instead there had been nothing but trees and snow. Fear churned in her stomach, making her insides a cauldron when the hunting cabin came into view. It was smaller than she remembered, barely a shack. The windows boarded up, the wood gray and swollen with fading red symbols painted on the door. The roof, covered in dried moss, was charred and breaking down. It bowed in the middle and had holes all about. It was buried deep on Wintu land, hidden behind giant pines and scrub brush, impossible to see from the wagon trail.
“How did your family even find this place from the wagon trail?” Alistair asked.
He and Westie stayed behind while Bena looked for signs of life.
“By accident,” Westie said, her voice thick with trepidation as she scanned the forest. “We’d fallen behind the rest of the caravan we’d been traveling with after my brother Tripp had taken ill. Our wagon had gotten caught in the snow and we were out of food, so my pa took us out into the woods to look for food and shelter.”
Westie had been holding Tripp’s hand as they’d searched. He was only a year younger than she was, but he was racked with fever and seemed so fragile. She thought about his sweet face and red hair, clutching the doll she’d given him. Its name was Clementine; her favorite, with a burlap dress, brown yarn hair, and button eyes. The memory made her eyes throb with impending tears.
“Why would you try to cross the mountains so close to winter?”
Westie forced air into her lungs, trying to compose herself. Clearing her throat, she said, “We’d heard California was free of the Undying. They’d taken over the prairie. We didn’t have much choice.”
The Undying’s takeover hadn’t happened all at once, but it felt like it had. Symptoms of the change were gradual, starting with a fever. No one even knew what had caused it at first. There’d been a drought that had lasted nearly two years, killing off crops and cattle so there wasn’t much to eat. Desperate, people began hunting and eating the wolves that roamed prairie. What they didn’t know was that those wolves were no ordinary canines but werewolves. What they also didn’t know at the time were the dire consequences of consuming creatures of magic.
The Undying had been slow, but there was a church of them and they liked to congregate. They were also hard to kill. Only way to keep them down was to cut off their heads. It took a lot of strength to sever one’s neck from its body.
She remembered those days vividly. Her mother hadn’t wanted to leave, holding out hope for a cure. But there was no true cure. It was only after Westie moved to Rogue City that she learned from Bena that magic was the only thing that could keep the disease at bay if caught in its early stages. It wouldn’t have helped those in the valley though; the settlers had decimated the only tribes on the prairie who could’ve conjured that magic.
At Westie’s father’s insistence, they cut their suspenders and braved the wagon trail to get to California.
Westie took a wavering breath. We should’ve stayed.
Westie sat taller in her saddle when she saw Bena come out of the forest. The Wintu hunter’s expression was as difficult to translate as her native language.
“What happened? What’d you see?” Westie asked.