An Easy Death Read online

  By dusk I was so ready to get out of the car and stop being bounced around that I could hardly bear it. I did not mind spending the night out in the open, because at least we would get to be still. After the long silences of the day, I was ready to talk to someone, even them.

  We made a fire and heated up some stuff from Jim’s provisions. “What is your home like?” I said, aiming the question somewhere between Eli and Paulina. They were both surprised I was starting a conversation. For a moment neither spoke.

  “I live in San Diego, close to the palace of our tsar. I have a room at my guild house,” Paulina said. She spoke real carefully, like she was testing the information lest she reveal any big secret.

  “How big?” She looked blank. “How big is your room?”

  “About as big as both the bedrooms we had last night put together. It has a sink. There are big bathrooms with toilet stalls and shower stalls, shared by all. We eat in the guild dining room.”

  That sounded real . . . institutional. “Did you get to pick your own furniture?”

  “I picked the furniture, yes.” She was warming up to the topic.

  “Can you do your own cooking?”

  “I eat in the dining room, almost always. But I can make tea in my room, and sometimes when I am out, I go to the bakery and pick up something for a meal.”

  “What about your washing?”

  “All my clothes and sheets, I take them to the laundry in the basement of the guild house.”

  “Do you clean your own room?”

  “No, there are cleaners who do that. They are all men and women who are relatives of wizards, so we have a hold on them if they steal or if they are bribed to take hair or any body waste from one of us.”

  That was charming.

  Bottom line was that Paulina had almost no responsibility for her own upkeep. I hoped she was doing a great job at whatever she did day to day, to make her worth being waited on like that.

  My mouth was full, so I pointed at Eli to indicate it was his turn. “I live at the palace,” he said.

  I’d expected his story to echo Paulina’s. I glanced at her, but she’d ducked her head to look at her food. Okay, I was learning something now.

  “I have a little room, very humble, in a wing far, far away from our tsar’s. My mentor, Dmitri Petrov, lives closer to His Imperial Highness.” Eli smiled and tried to catch Paulina’s eye.

  “That’s funny?” I said.

  “He is so close to the tsar that he has the honor of being wakened very often in the night when the tsar is in pain.” He was still trying to get Paulina to look at him, to share his little bit of humor that living in the palace was a real big pain in the ass. But Paulina wasn’t having any of that. She would have given a finger or two, it was easy to see, if she could have been inconvenienced by Tsar Alexei waking her in the night.

  “Alexei’s sickly with the bleeding disease?” I said cautiously. It was no big secret anymore. Couldn’t keep things under wraps in the Holy Russian Empire the way you could in imperial Russia.

  They both nodded. “His wife is pregnant with their first child to be carried this long,” Eli said.

  “That’s big news, I guess.” What I didn’t know about the Russians . . . well, it was a lot.

  “Yes, very big, to us,” Paulina said, her tone telling that “us” was all that mattered.

  “It’s the second time he’s been married, right?”

  “Yes,” Eli said. “His first wife died of influenza.”

  “She was the rich one,” I said, knowing as soon as the words had left my mouth that I shouldn’t have said it.

  “Yes,” Eli said without any expression. “She was from the Ballard family.”

  The Ballard family pretty much ruled a lot of Dixie. Family members had made huge fortunes on cotton, sugarcane, and timber, planted and harvested by the labor of people who were real poor and really unable to leave their situation. My friend Galilee had been the daughter of such a man. He owed the company store so much he could never discharge his debt, though he worked day in and day out. There was nowhere for him to go that the debt would not follow him, unless he somehow got a huge amount of money and could get out of Dixie with speed. That wasn’t going to happen.

  But when Galilee had come up pregnant, her mom and dad had scraped together the money to get her out of there. They’d hired an Indian, a Choctaw, who seemed to be invisible to white people. He hadn’t been a bad man, Galilee had told me, but he’d been a man, and sometimes it had been a harder journey than she’d ever counted on, until they reached a place she felt safe and she could tell him to leave her.

  And I was not going to think about Galilee now. I put my mind back on the tsar’s situation.

  I could see how the grigoris would try to maintain a sort of militant silence about the tsar’s first wife. Thanks to that marriage, the Russian royal family could act royal again, since they had the padding of the Ballard money.

  “None of the tsar’s daughters have this bleeding disease?”

  “No. But Olga and Tatiana each have a son who does.”

  The most memorable thing about the previous tsar, Nicholas, was that when he’d fled the godless country, he’d formed engagements for all his five children within two years, starting with his oldest daughter and working down to Alexei, his youngest child. At least as far as we Texomans were concerned, that was the most memorable thing.

  Thanks to his daughters of marriageable age, the tsar who’d escaped the rebels in his country had flourished, especially after he’d landed in America. And he’d had some real shrewd advice in farming them out. There had been people who’d wanted to connect with royalty—even royalty in exile—so bad they’d practically drooled at getting one of the grand duchesses yoked into their families. Even at the risk of having grandchildren who stood little chance of living to grow up.

  “So it’s only boys who get this bleeding thing?”

  Paulina and Eli looked at each other. “It’s not certain,” she said. “But it looks that way.”

  “But some boys don’t get it.”

  They nodded simultaneously.

  “There’s no way to know, if the woman’s going to pass it to her baby?”

  Again the nod. Tsar Alexei and his second wife, a Danish princess, were probably praying every day for a healthy boy who didn’t have the bleeding disease. What if the tsar’s wife had a girl, and then the tsar died?

  My stepfather, who read every newspaper he could get and also listened to the radio, had told me it was a miracle the tsar had lived so long. Alexei’d almost passed so many times there was probably a coffin and a plan of the funeral somewhere in a drawer in the palace in San Diego.

  I thought about it for a few minutes that night, lying on my blanket in nowhere, listening to the little sounds of the two grigoris sleeping, the movements of small animals in the sparse brush. No matter what glorious marriages Alexei’s sisters had made, they could not rule if Alexei died. His baby boy—if he had a boy—would inherit the throne.

  Babies were fragile. I could see why it was so important to keep Alexei alive and breeding. But why was the blood of one half-assed wizard essential, the point of this search by Eli and Paulina? Why had the guilds sent these two on this quest? They needed the blood of Oleg Karkarov specifically, and that was just weird. And since my father was dead, his kids’ blood would be the best substitute, apparently, given the grigoris’ reaction to the idea that the girl in Juárez might be a daughter of Oleg’s.

  If this child in Juárez was not Oleg Karkarov’s, I was his only living child, as far as I knew. Or at least the only living person who knew she was his. If Eli and Paulina figured that out, and sooner or later they would, I was going to be made to go someplace I didn’t want to go, to serve someone I didn’t want to serve. And maybe my life would be taken.

  There was no point wishing the grigoris had never heard my name or come to my door. Wishing never gets you anywhere.

  I had a practical idea. I
f I were smart, I’d just kill my companions right now, while I could catch them by surprise. It would have to be one killing shot apiece, bam bam. If either one had a chance to work magic, I was done for.

  But by the time I went to sleep, I hadn’t killed them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next day was grim. The sun beat down, the car needed gas, we didn’t have coffee or tea or much water, breakfast was sketchy, and the two grigoris were stiff from sleeping on the ground. Paulina out-and-out ordered me to drive. I slid behind the wheel. Though the land was changing, becoming hillier, with more places of concealment, I didn’t protest. If they wanted to get shot more than they wanted to drive, I was in the mood to oblige them. We jolted and bounced across the land, following what was more a track than a road.

  I knew we were going in the right direction, but Eli felt he had to pull out a compass to show me that we were. Paulina’s quick eyes picked out my exasperation, and it pleased her. She didn’t want me to like Eli. She would love it if we quarreled.

  I could not figure out Paulina. I thought, When she was underneath Andy, maybe she called him Eli. Or maybe Paulina and Eli were related somehow? If I asked them, she’d know I’d been thinking about their relationship, and that would make her hackles rise. Better not to risk it.

  Around noon we stopped to get out of the car for a while. By sheer luck, I spotted a huge jackrabbit. I brought him down with Marcial Montes’s rifle. It would be dumb not to eat while the meat was fresh.

  I built a fire and put up two little towers of rocks, skewering the carcass on a stick and laying the stick ends on the little towers. While I went a short distance away to pee, Eli turned the skewer.

  Paulina had taken off in the opposite direction. She returned with some green stuff she said was edible and good for you. It was a plant I’d seen before but never tried to eat. I watched her take a bite first; that was how much I trusted Paulina.

  The leaves didn’t taste bad, a little peppery. Since they were fuzzy, the feeling of them in my mouth was not pleasant. But fresh green stuff is hard to find the farther south you go, and my mom had always told me it was important to include vegetables in your eating habits. I hoped I was healthier after I’d made myself swallow a mouthful. It was like chewing a caterpillar.

  The jackrabbit tasted even better after the leaves, though. It was done just right. I cut it into pieces with my knife and shared it around. Only the bones were left when we got back into the Tourer.

  This time Eli drove, so I was in the back seat. I tried to stay alert, but the long day and the heat and the jolting made me feel stupid. I hated the car by the time we stopped. We’d have to spend another night on the road.

  We’d been going south-southwest steadily, and the plants and scrubby trees were getting farther and farther apart, though the hills were higher and closer together. Eli located some water by his witchy ability, but it was not clear water. We filled up our canteens but had to let the particles in it settle before it was fit to drink, and it was warm and bitter going down our throats.

  But any water was better than no water, and any food better than no food. That night I killed two snakes it was safe for us to eat, and they weren’t too bad after roasting. Not a lot of actual meat, though. I was about to wrap up in my blanket, since the night was getting chilly.

  I heard something that made me sit up so sharply that Paulina jumped. I held up my hand, telling the grigoris to be silent, and they did, for a wonder. I listened hard. I heard the sound of metal clicking against metal. That wasn’t going to happen unless people were around. I stood and drew my pistol.

  A strange woman stepped into the firelight. Her hands were empty and held wide apart, so I didn’t shoot her. She smiled at me, then at Paulina, and then at Eli. That was just creepy. Most people didn’t smile at a gun unless they were simple, or unless they knew something you didn’t know. I didn’t like either of those ideas.

  We all waited for the stranger to speak, but she didn’t. She had rippling black hair and big, dark eyes. Her white blouse was spanky clean. Her silver earrings made tinkly sounds. She looked like a woman men dreamed about.

  The newcomer crossed her arms over her chest in a deliberate way. It was a signal. Not one I recognized. But Paulina did.

  After a long hesitation Paulina said, “Welcome to our campfire. I’m Paulina of the Fire Guild, and this is Eli of the Water Guild.” Paulina was well aware this creature was not regular, not at all. There was badness all around us.

  I wanted to shoot this woman. But I held off, thinking Paulina would give me a signal if that was what she wanted. Paulina and Eli were too completely focused on her to spare me a thought. At least, Paulina couldn’t seem to look in my direction. But then, neither did the newcomer.

  I glanced at Eli and grew more worried. Maybe they couldn’t spare me a thought for real. Eli seemed to be under a spell. His face was blank and his eyes half-closed, and from the state of his pants I could tell he was physically ready to jump on this stranger right in front of us.

  “I can tell none of you will harm me.” She smiled with a real awareness, kind of I’m so beautiful. “Wizarrrrd,” she said coaxingly, “come herrrre.” She swung her head, and her earrings clicked.

  An alarm sounded inside me as I felt a horrible, creeping fuzziness in my head. It was like the leaves we’d eaten had gotten into my brain. Moving with terrible slowness—at least in my mind—I drew one of the Colts and I pulled the trigger.

  She gave me one totally amazed look as a big red stain spoiled that white blouse.

  Eli screamed. With a huge effort Paulina broke free from whatever had grabbed her to launch herself forward. She grabbed the witch’s skirt as if she feared the woman would run away; instead the witch fell backward. Paulina sprawled on her stomach—way too close to the fire, still clutching the skirt—and panted for the space of three breaths. But after that, flinging off whatever had held her still, Paulina leaped on the witch, her face right above the witch’s, like she was going to kiss her. Instead she began sucking out the few moments the witch had left.

  I could see the remnants of life flowing out of the dying woman’s mouth. I could see her ghost, a white, shadowy thing rising up out of her, being sucked into Paulina’s open lips.

  I was sickened. Paulina had stepped across some line in my head. She should die, too.

  My finger was actually tightening on the trigger when Eli threw himself on me, much the way Paulina had thrown herself on the witch. At least he didn’t seem to want to take my soul. His interest lay elsewhere. I could feel . . . oh, God, he was hard as a rock. I did not move even a tiny bit. His arm was pinning down my gun hand, but I could still manage to shoot him if I had to. “Eli Savarov,” I said. He blinked. “Eli Savarov,” I said again. “Get the hell off of me.”

  I watched his personality flowing back into him.

  “I . . .” Eli’s expression was dazed. He could not come up with words.

  “Off.”

  Eli stared into my eyes a moment longer. It was a very long moment. Then he rolled off and lay panting like a dog, looking up at the stars. I looked at them with him. He took my hand and squeezed it. He released it quickly. It was an apology. “Not like this,” he whispered.

  While Paulina finished her spiritual cannibal act, I calmed down. If Eli’s breathing was anything to go by, so did he.

  “You okay?” Paulina was standing over me.

  “I am.”

  “Why are you lying on your back?”

  It was real clear Paulina had been totally wrapped up in her soul-sucking, since Eli landing on top of me with a big hard-on was not something she’d miss or let pass, ordinarily.

  “It seemed like a good idea,” I said, and struggled to sit up. Paulina reached down to help me, and it didn’t feel like a good idea to refuse to take her hand. I looked to my right. Somehow Eli had already resumed his seat by the fire. I’d lost a minute or two.

  “When I signed on to do this, I didn’t realize I’d be
so damn busy,” I said, trying to reenter the world as I knew it. “Out in the middle of this nothing, that thing pops up acting all I’m so sexy. How?”

  “Look,” Paulina said, pointing at the body. Though I didn’t want to, I followed her finger. A woman in her eighties stared at me sightlessly. It was the same woman. She was still dressed in a white (but red-stained) blouse and a blue skirt. My stomach gave a lurch.

  “Is that the way she really looked, or did she wither when you sucked her soul out?”

  My question startled Paulina, and Eli, too. They both stared at me. Shit. I’d said something interesting again. “You could see that,” Paulina said thoughtfully.

  If there was anything I didn’t want, it was for Paulina to think about me.

  “I saw a cloudy something,” I said. “I’m not going any farther than saying that.” I’d already said too much.

  “When one of us is dying,” Eli said, “we can take the power.”

  “Like I take the gun,” I said.

  “Just so,” Paulina said approvingly. “The gun is your weapon and your livelihood. Magic is ours.”

  Well, I just loved being like Paulina. I was so glad she’d noticed.

  “How’d she find us?” That was the most important thing we had to settle. I walked a few steps to the rock I’d been sitting on before the witch had shown up. I sat down a little harder than I’d planned on.

  “In the morning Eli and I will find out.”

  After I’d become sure I was in the here and now, the witch was dead, and Paulina and Eli were unharmed and in their right minds, I lay down on my blanket and wrapped it around me. I’d folded up my jacket to be a pillow. Shortly, the other two did the same. The fire was dying out, but when I turned on my side, I could see Eli was looking at me.

  I looked back.

  He’d landed on me when the witch had made him horny. Not Paulina. He’d gone where he had thought about going. I couldn’t unthink that. I didn’t want to.

  Then I willed myself to close my eyes. After a few minutes I slept.