Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The Dusk hit her like a hand — the perpetual bruised light of the wastes pressing against her eyes after the cave’s absolute dark. She blinked heavy eyes against the light and groaned as she lifted her head to look at who had spoken.
Above her, on a flat stone at the mesa’s edge…
Dee.
Sitting. Patient. Gun already drawn and leveled at a spot between her eyes.
Dee had been here long enough to settle. That was the first thing the stranger read — the quality of someone who had settled into a position and stopped anticipating the wait, certain enough of the outcome that the waiting itself had become routine. The gun was held with the ease of a decision already made.
Dee’s shoulder was still wrong. The stranger could see it in the angle of the arm, her shooting arm — a shoulder leaning slantwise, the way the elbow sat slightly too high, compensating for something that had not yet healed and would not until it was properly set.
The stranger did not look for the crow. It was somewhere above. She had an awareness of its presence. It was neither sight nor sound that brought its gravity of being to her. Like the Dusk, the crow carried its own pressure and weight that pushed against her periphery at times.
Dee’s eyes assessed the stranger in the same manner as they had back at the camp. Something in that assessment shifted sideways when Dee’s eyes met hers. A faintest of frowns tugging at the corner of Dee’s mouth.
The curve of Dee’s lips tightened, drawing out into a hard, flat line, her eyes narrowed.
“That mark you’re wearing,” Dee said, her voice carrying the particular flatness of someone getting down to business. “Seen its like before. Heard about it at least.” She tilted her head. The pause that followed had weight to it. “Incomplete one means something different than a complete one, they say.”
The stranger said nothing.
“Where I heard tell, I was to be wary of the gun more than the woman carrying it.” Dee paused. “Said the gun had an old name to go with an old look. Said it belonged to someone who’d earned it.” Another pause, this one deliberate. “He sure seemed to doubt that woman… you, I reckon… had done much in the way of earning it.”
The stranger said nothing, her lapis eyes piercing into Dee’s.
“What was that name?” A long pause. A finger to her temple. Dee snapped her fingers.
“Oldbone.” Dee said the name with the care of someone producing a thing of value. Testing whether it landed. “That’s what he called it. Said news of where it was might fetch nearly the same price as the gun itself. To the right party, of course.”
Silence was the response.
Dee’s jaw shifted as she set it. “I tol’ you at the camp. I tol’ you to your back while you were walking away from me like I wasn’t worth no bother.”
Her voice flattened further.
“You might also recall that I said I’d collect that debt of yours. That debt you owe for the crow’s keeping? Yeah, that. Said I’d be the one coming for it.”
The stranger was pushing herself up from the ground, all of her weight on one hand.
“You think you’re the only one who knows which direction Absalom lies?”
Something small in that. A reaction, almost. The word landing in a register that was not quite indifferent — a slight change in the quality of her attention, there and gone, too small to be certainty and too present to be nothing.
Dee saw it. It was the first card she had played that had come close.
Dee stepped away from the rock.
Dee brought the gun up and the shoulder went wrong at the top of the motion. The shot meant for the stranger’s head went low and wide and she was already moving in the direction away from the barrel’s line and the bullet found her thigh anyway, piercing a hole through and through, as she turned away.
There was no pain. That would come later.
The stranger had not decided to use Oldbone. Her body had.
The twist draw. The gun coming up in the motion Emrys had drilled into her until it lived in her hands rather than her head. That old jackal had been thorough about it.
Her mouth shaped the name.
Dee.
The trigger squeezed.
The shot echoed against the mesa’s sheer wall.
Dee’s mouth hung open. The dark red was spreading against her dirty button-up. There was surprise in her expression — this had not been part of the plan.
The crow called out from somewhere above.
Kronk.
Kronk.
Kronk.
Dee’s eyes went dark. Not out. Dark.
The stranger’s world shifted sideways.
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