Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.

The stranger was at the spring before the light changed.

What passed for dawn in mesa country under the Dusk was less an arrival than a slow reluctant brightening, the darkness thinning at the edges without fully committing to anything else. The temperature had dropped further in the night and the sage at the mesa’s foot was stiff with cold, the leaves silver-grey and sharp-smelling when she stripped them from the stems. She worked quickly, her breath visible, her hands certain about what they were doing in the way hands get certain about things the mind has stopped needing to supervise.

Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.

The Necessary was quiet when she returned and one of the lanterns had sputtered out, adding to the dim. Cressida had Caldwell in a chair by the bar, his jaw held gingerly in one hand, his eyes suggesting he was present but still taking inventory of the situation.

The crow was on the bar. It watched Caldwell with the detached attention of something that has seen this kind of thing before and found it neither alarming nor particularly interesting.

“Room,” the stranger said to Cressida.

Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.

The stranger cautiously mounted the stairs leading to the batwing doors of the saloon named The Necessary, according to the shingle still partially chained to the lintel overshadowing the entrance. The sign rotated in lazy circles on the remaining chain.

As the gloaming became an abstract night, a handful of lanterns cast shadows on to the boardwalk outside, dancing horned demons thrown across on the rough-hewn planks at her feet.

Stepping inside, the stranger noticed the two lanterns burning low cast a grotesquerie of shadows bent around at angles, making the interior a space twisting in on itself. The bar was intact, clean and polished. The mirror running along the length of the bar behind it had not been fared so well — a crack ran the full span of silvered glass, splitting every reflection in two pieces that refused to align across the broken divide.

Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.

She faded in from the night like a phantasm, clothed in all black save for the flowing cinnabar wrap layered around her neck, riding a pale horse that matched her porcelain-hued high cheeks. She moved at the unhurried pace of someone who had nowhere better to be and knew it. A large black bird rode the figure’s shoulder, its eyes reflecting in cerulean what little light the night sky had left to offer.

She might have beautiful at one time, Harlan thought to himself, but something had changed that — though he knew not if it was the tattoo he could only barely make out from the window that marred her face, or the dour expression she wore as she looked up and down the town’s streets.