“Is that blood?” she asked, voice cracking.
Alistair stared down at the spot warily, touched the red, tacky substance, rubbed it between his fingers, and sniffed. “I believe so.”
Dread filled her. “What if they hurt him?” She gathered her skirt in her fist.
Alistair took her hand, soothing her. “Look at me.” She met his gaze and let the fiery determination in his eyes curb her anxiety. “Nigel will be fine. He’s a smart man—a brilliant man. He can take care of himself. Besides, there’s barely enough blood there for a paper cut. You’ve seen the scars on his hands. The man always has an open wound after working with rough metal.”
Westie nodded. Her resolve felt like a glass vase on a shelf during an earthquake, so close to shattering. “I suppose you’re right. Let’s get on while the sun’s still with us.”
Westie and Alistair took Nigel’s steam carriage to give their horses time to rest. Alistair drove while Westie fed the fire. The more coal she gave it, the faster it wanted to go until Alistair was begging her to slow down. Finding the road flooded, they had to double back and take the longer route through town. It took thirty minutes to get to the mine on the other side of Nigel’s property. The sun had just settled behind the mountains when they arrived. The weak light coated everything in a dull gray haze. The buggy and draft horses used to tow Emma were out front, as well as the sheriff’s horse and James’s lazy city pony.
“See, there was nothing to worry about after all,” Alistair said as he secured the brake.
Westie had to admit it was a relief seeing the others’ horses. She grabbed her parasol off her seat. Just in case.
The darkness of the mine’s entrance looked like a solid thing, as if it could break a bone were someone to step too quickly into it.
“It’s awfully dark in there,” Westie said. “Why aren’t there any torches lit?”
Alistair took her hand. She detected, for a moment, the slightest tremble in his touch.
“They might be too far inside the mine to see any light.”
“Nigel!” Westie called.
Only her echo answered back.
Before they’d left the mansion, Westie had dumped her bags, bringing only the newspaper clippings with her, not even thinking she might need the lantern.
“They’ll have a torch inside. We’ll just keep walking till we see light,” Alistair said, his mind on the same track as hers.
Westie heard the tinny clink of Nigel’s machine somewhere in the dark and felt the weight of the world on her shoulders lighten. Perhaps Nigel and James were too deep in the mine to hear her calling them. As she walked farther in, she heard a noise like a hiss—but not the same kind as Alistair’s mask—that made her stop. A light flickered a short distance in front of her.
“Did you see that?” she said.
Alistair made a sound beside her that would have almost sounded like a yelp had his mechanics been capable of making such a sound. She heard his feet kicking at the rocky ground and felt his hand tug at hers until they were yanked apart. The cold emptiness of his absence filled her palm.
“Alley!” she cried.
Something brushed against her arm in the dark. Not Alistair, she knew, and not Nigel or the sheriff, for they would’ve revealed themselves.
The sound came again, that same scratching hiss, only this time she recognized it as flint being struck. A spark in front of her turned into a drop of light at the tip of a candle’s wick. Westie sucked down a startled breath when she saw Lavina’s face illuminated above the flame, a floating head in a black sea.
“Finally,” Lavina said calmly. “Did the two of you walk back from Sacramento?”
Every muscle in Westie’s body was wound tight enough to crush her bones. “I swear if you hurt him, I’ll blow your lamp out once and for all.”
She pulled the parasol from the scabbard behind her back and held it at her side.
There was another hiss and then another as torches ignited, stripping the wide cave of its mysteries. Westie squinted as her vision adjusted to the light, and when it finally did, what she saw brought a new and improved kind of fear, bigger and more special than anything she’d ever experienced before.
They stood like a morbid family portrait, with Emma as their backdrop: Lavina and Hubbard in the middle, Cain to the right with his arm around Alistair and a blade to his neck, the mayor and James to the left, Nigel gagged and tied to a chair, beaten but otherwise unharmed. Then there was the sheriff’s mutilated body lying on the ground in front, naked from the waist up, his arms, half his face, and his belly all eaten clear down to the bone. When Westie opened her mouth, it wasn’t a scream that came out, but a sob.