Lost Vegas Series Page 9

  Aveline’s mind went again to her father and then to Rocky, and she stared at the ceiling, doubting she was going to sleep at all this night. Too much was depending on her success. Of everything to be concerned about, why was she hoping the kitchens had a bowl of strawberries for her to grab for Tiana in the morning?

  Chapter Six

  Arthur and his closest friend, Warner, sat on one side of a bonfire at the edge of their encampment, their native tracker opposite them. Dressed similarly in layers of cotton, leather and fur, the native was distinguished from the Shield members by the three feathers in his long hair and the lack of sash anywhere on his body. Arthur wore his around his bicep and Warner around his waist.

  Arthur gazed into the dancing flames, pensive. The night was cold enough that he wore a furlined hat with flaps to protect his ears in addition to thick clothing, winter boots and a scarf made by his sister he kept wrapped tightly around his neck.

  “You have determined our path tomorrow?” Leaping Deer, the native tracker, one of the few surviving members of the Comanche Nation, asked quietly.

  Arthur glanced up at him then around to ensure they were not being observed by the other Shield soldiers. Withdrawing a steel knife from the satchel at his side, he placed it on the ground before him, rested his hand on it, and closed his eyes.

  Show me where we will find game, he willed the weapon.

  It began to move beneath his fingers, and he lifted his hand and opened his eyes.

  The tip of the blade pointed northwest.

  “Then northwest we will go,” Leaping Deer said with a half-smile.

  Arthur replaced the weapon. His unusual gift, while saving the city many winters from starvation, was likewise forbidden. If anyone discovered exactly how his family was so successful finding food, he would be burnt at the stake, alongside his father and sister. His stepmother, he guessed, would probably lie her way out of everything. She had a survivor’s instinct he would have admired, if not for the accompanying ambition he suspected would drive her to turn on her husband at a moment’s notice.

  Leery of one of the Shield soldiers noticing his magic, Arthur twisted all the way around to survey his surroundings.

  “No one saw,” Warner assured him.

  “I would claim it to be native magic if they did,” Leaping Deer added. A friend of the family for two decades, the native living in a village near the city was permitted to he use magic whereas those inside the city were not.

  “Thank you.” Arthur smiled at his companions.

  “You are normally more eager for the annual hunt. Your father would not allow his heir apparent to leave the city, if we did not need your special magic to find game,” Leaping Deer observed.

  “I am thrilled to be out of the city but also worried,” Arthur assured him. “My father and his advisors have been at odds, and I suspect a shift in the alliances of the families around us, which makes this year’s hunt ill timed.”

  “How is this different than any other year?” Warner retorted with a small laugh. “They are at odds when food is scarce and lovers when we return victorious laden with meat enough for three winters.”

  “True,” Arthur said. He hesitated to speak of something far more private, even though he trusted these two men with his life. After a moment of internal debate, he charged ahead. “I have been plagued by a dream for the past month. It makes me believe it is not a dream but a … vision. I have them from time to time.” He glanced at both men, waiting for one of them to judge him and relaxing when neither did. If anything, Warner was studying him in concern while Leaping Deer appeared curious. They were more comfortable with him discussing his strange abilities than he was.

  “Please tell me you do not see your death,” Warner whispered.

  “No,” Arthur said quickly and reached over to squeeze the hand of his longtime guardian and lover. “Nothing of the sort. This dream is so bizarre, I have feared revealing it even to you. There is little sense to it, and I have tried to decipher it through reading and seeking general counsel from the clairvoyants Father permits entrance into the city. But the meaning of this dream eludes me, and I cannot speak to anyone else about the specifics.”

  Warner waited, his blue eyes glued to Arthur’s face.

  “Perhaps, Leaping Deer, you can help me interpret it,” Arthur said.

  “Me?” The native lifted his eyes from the fire. “I am not the one possessing magic.”

  “You make my deformity sound pleasant.”

  “You deny the gift your gods have given you. In the Free Lands, you would be beyond the wrath of your father,” Leaping Deer reminded him.

  Free Lands. The mention of the legendary place earlier by his sister made Arthur pause. How she overheard the slaves talking, he did not know, but she often picked up on information he wished she had not. The existence of the Free Lands was one of those trinkets of knowledge he did not wish her to possess. At least, not yet, not until he had verified they existed. She was too frail to be led on and then disappointed if he discovered they were not real. He would rather wait until he knew with certainty.

  “I hear talk of the Free Lands but have never met anyone who has visited them,” Arthur said.

  “If they are as wonderful as we hear, who would leave?” Warner asked.

  “True,” Arthur agreed. “But then how would we know they existed in the first place?”

  Warner turned his attention to Leaping Deer. “Have the people of your village visited the Free Lands?”

  “No,” was the response. “The tribal elders have spoken of the Free Lands to the north for many years, but no one has ever ventured that far to see if they exist. It is believed that there are far worse dangers than the forests, plains and Ghouls that lie between us and the Free Lands. Perhaps we have never heard of anyone returning from them, because no one who sought them reached them in the first place.”

  I need them to be real, Arthur thought. Leaping Deer’s fears had been repeated to Arthur by everyone he asked about the Free Lands, including the clairvoyants he was only allowed to speak to in passing. Under the watchful gaze of his father, Arthur had little opportunity to pursue the questions burning hottest inside him and instead was forced to play his part and seize any chance presented to him to further his quest for knowledge.

  But the older Tiana became, the less time he had. Their father had rebuffed both the council and the pressure other wealthy families put on him to marry her off and cement an alliance between powerful families, as was traditional. When she turned eighteen, people would begin to suspect she was disfigured, if their father did not announce her engagement to one of the many available heirs from other families wishing to climb the social strata.

  “Your dream,” Leaping Deer prodded him.

  Arthur blinked out of his thoughts. “Nightmares are more accurate,” he said. “Do not laugh at me, either of you!” He gave them looks of playful warning, self-conscious of sharing the odd dream. “No matter what dream I am having, a native man will appear and begin chasing me. He’s not from the Apache or Navajo or any of the nations with whom your tribe, or our city, is at peace,” he said to Leaping Deer. “This native is different, and if you ask me why, I am uncertain what to say. I know it, just as I know which direction we must go to hunt game.”

  “Not all of the first peoples were destroyed with the Old World. It is said there are a few very old tribes from the Northeast, where it is winter for nine months a year,” Leaping Deer said. “It is possible you have made contact with one of their holy men in your dreams.”

  “I hope not,” Arthur said with a snort. “This man is not like us. He takes on the form of a bear sometimes and a wolf at other times and still other times, a horrible creature I have never seen before and cannot even begin to describe.” He paused, recalling the dream, before continuing. “But he finds me no matter what dream I am having or where I am in my dream. When he appears, everything changes, and I return to the same place every time.”

  “Where?�
�� Warner asked.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Arthur admitted. “In every dream, I am running from him across the plains, but I cannot identify which grasslands these are. A place I have visited? A place far away?” He shook his head. “I am always in a prairie.”

  “What else do you see?” Leaping Deer asked.

  “Spring is in the air, a little cool, yet warm enough not to need furs or a cloak. The grass is high, the wind strong, and the full moon is above, bright enough to make the grass glow silver. I run, and he chases me, sometimes in one of his animal forms, sometimes in his man form. In his man form, I can see he is crippled. One of his legs is only half a leg, and he wears a contraption that allows him to move like a normal man. This … contraption,” he made motions in the air, uncertain how to explain the awkward sight from his dream, “is covered at all times in black leather. Whether he’s an animal or a human, one of his legs is always black, which is how I always know he is the one pursuing me no matter what form he takes.”

  Arthur paused. His audience was completely enraptured. Warner appeared concerned, but it was Leaping Deer’s narrowed gaze that alerted him something about the dream was of particular interest to the tracker.

  “I started calling him Black Leg,” Arthur admitted, a little sheepishly. “This magic that lets him change into animals, and lets him track me, no matter where I am in my dreams, and which pulls me back onto the prairie in Spring, is contained in his leg.”

  “His leg is magic?” Warner echoed, brow furrowed.

  “Yes. I know it sounds comical or bizarre,” Arthur said. “But his magic is stored or … maybe just exists in his leg. I cannot rationally explain it.”

  “And Black Leg appears in every dream?”

  “Every one for the past month.”

  “Does he ever catch you?”

  “Never. He never comes closer than that tree.” Arthur pointed to a tree ten feet away. “But he never stops trying, either.”

  Leaping Deer was frowning fiercely.

  “What is it?” Warner asked the tracker. “Does this mean something to your people?”

  “According to the spirits of my ancestors …” Leaping Deer began and then winked.

  Warner’s face flared red, and Arthur chuckled.

  “We are not all mystics and shaman,” the native said. “But, Arthur, there are two elements of your dream I recognize. The first scares me less than the second. You frighten your children with tales of the Ghouls, and we tell our children stories about skinwalkers, men who can turn into bears or wolves or similar.”

  “But Ghouls are real,” Warner insisted and then sighed at the tracker’s patient smile. “Ah. So are skinwalkers.”

  “When the Old World ended, a lot of strange things happened. Skinwalkers became as real as the Ghouls.”

  “If skinwalkers are anything like Ghouls, how can anything else frighten you more?” Arthur exclaimed. “I have seen the forms a skinwalker takes. I would rather meet a Ghoul!”

  “What frightens me more: this man who chases you in your dreams really exists,” Leaping Deer said. “He is a boogeyman among my people. They fear speaking of him, lest they become his next victim.”

  Arthur’s stomach twisted. He had sensed the dream was not entirely fiction but hoped he was wrong.

  “He is from the far northeast, or the south or perhaps even the west. No one knows, except he is the last of his kind, a legendary bounty hunter who invited the dark spirits into himself so he could seek vengeance on those who murdered his family,” Leaping Deer said. “In the meantime, until he can find them, he is hired by wealthy natives to hunt down and kill the descendants of the Old World and the invaders who stole our lands from us long ago. He has killed other natives, too, and worked for men of all nations and colors. He serves any master willing to pay his price, and he never accepts money as payment.”

  “What else is there?” Warner exclaimed.

  “No one knows except those who pay him. They are sworn to secrecy.” Leaping Deer shrugged. “It is also believed, and widely ridiculed, that the dark spirits he invited into his life live in his leg. If you have seen this, Arthur, without knowing the legend, maybe it is far truer than anyone thought.”

  Silence fell, and Arthur’s heart began to skip beats. The part of his dream he did not reveal was that he was not himself when he was running. He had long, blond, wavy hair and wore a sleeping gown. Tiana had been the one fleeing the bounty hunter, not him.

  “He is said to be ruthless, violent and invincible, and his magic leg protects him from harm. He has never failed to find his target,” Leaping Deer continued.

  “What would he want with Arthur?” Warner spoke in a hushed tone. “The natives do not trust us, but if they wished to kill someone, why Arthur and not his father?”

  A better question: why Tiana? Arthur mulled.

  “Shall I ask my ancestors?” Leaping Deer asked dryly.

  Warner shook his head. “We have no enemies outside the city that we know of. Do we?”

  “It might be possible the natives have hired him, perhaps thinking if they can topple the Hanover’s, the city will crumble. Our truces of the past generation have pleased no one, inside the city or out,” Arthur said. “Or, maybe our enemies within the city hired him to unseat my family. The fact someone wants me dead does not surprise me. My family has built up a long list of people who would like to see us gone over the past two hundred years. But the man chasing me in my dreams …” he drifted off, more disturbed after Leaping Deer’s explanation than he had been waking from each dream. “… every night, Warner. He is there every night.”

  It was one of the reasons behind Arthur’s search for a guardian for his sister. When she turned eighteen, Tiana’s continued existence would become a larger challenge. Matilda and members of other ambitious families had always hated Arthur’s sister, but it was his father he feared the most. Tiana could not be married off when she turned eighteen for fear of someone discovering her deformities, and this caused his father a political problem. Arthur did not have enough faith in his father to hope for another creative solution to the issue of Tiana. A quiet assassination made the most sense.

  However, a native with one black leg would not go unnoticed in a city that did not welcome natives in the first place, which meant Tiana faced potential threats from at least two directions.

  With the Winter Hunt looming, two months before Tiana’s birthday, Arthur grew concerned about leaving his sister vulnerable in her own home. Amongst the nightmares of being chased by Black Leg, Arthur had also dreamt nightly of a young woman of mixed heritage standing beside his sister in front of the window in Tiana’s room, overlooking the city. The girl had not been among any of the slaves, and Arthur’s search hastily expanded from the outer city residents to those of the inner city. When his spies uncovered the identity of the girl, he was confronted with another problem. How could he place Tiana’s life in the hands of the Devil? By the rules of the Guild, an assassin-in-training would not be permitted to protect Tiana without the leader’s permission.

  Even if it had been possible to arrange for Aveline to become Tiana’s protector, how did Arthur welcome the daughter of a mass murderer – both of whom were rumored to have the blood of the devil in their blood – into his home? His and Tiana’s own faulty breeding was the reason Tiana could not leave her room.

  Or was it the blood of the devil that would protect Tiana? In his discreet pursuit for more information, carried out by faithful slaves, Arthur had found no other explanation as to why Aveline was special, aside from her demon blood. At the last minute, a clairvoyant had slipped him a tip about the pending death of her father, the day before the hunt, and advised him as to how and where he could contact her. Aveline had possessed no other choice but to accept the only position that would guarantee her life.

  One of Arthur’s visions had been accurate, and it scared him to consider the other might be as well.

  “I will die to protect you,” Warner vowed,
assuming Arthur’s troubled silence was for his own life.

  Arthur’s gaze flickered to his friend. “I would not let you. Besides, I am not concerned for myself but for my sister. If anything happened to me, she would be alone.”

  “I will take care of her as well,” Warner said without hesitation.

  “I know, and I am grateful to have you in my life and by my side,” Arthur said with a quick smile. “Do you know the name of this bounty hunter?” he asked Leaping Deer.

  “No one does. He is called many names. Black Leg is one. Black Wolf. Black Bear,” Leaping Deer shrugged. “The names are never the same but the magic leg is.”

  “Then he will be easy to identify, if I pay for a bounty of my own,” Arthur responded confidently. “I will have him killed before he reaches the city.”

  “If you can find him. He is known for his stealth.”

  My sister has suffered enough, Arthur answered silently.

  They sat in quiet for a long moment, each of them deep in thought.

  “Go and rest,” Arthur said finally. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow. We need to reach the other end of the forest and the herds before the snow starts again.”

  Leaping Deer nodded and rose. His steps crunched across the snow as he strode towards his tent.

  Arthur stood more slowly, and he and Warner struck off towards the tent they shared. The men were paired up for safety reasons, and it was easy for Arthur and Warner to share a tent when Warner was Arthur’s official guardian.

  When they were outside the firelight, Warner slid his hand into Arthur’s. Arthur squeezed his in return, but he was unable to take his mind off the dreams surely awaiting him this night, or the coldness at his core no amount of furs and flames could warm.

  His visions, while powerful, remained frustrating glimpses in time, often with no way for him to know when or how the events he foresaw would unfold. The strange abilities he and Tiana both possessed were beyond rational explanation. Since such sorcery was also forbidden within the city, he rarely had a chance to speak to anyone about it. None of the books in his father’s expansive library addressed the odd abilities, and nowhere in his family history was there any record of deformities or special abilities. Whatever secrets his family kept were so tightly controlled, no trace remained.