one of those things. There he was, coming at me like a rabid dog. There wasn't nothing left of him inside that body no more, but it still looked just like him. The monster wearing his skin would have done in for poor old Father Baez, but I..." she swallowed. "I done it in first. I pointed my gun right at my Ben's face and pulled the trigger."
Cora threw her head back and drained the contents of the flask in one long draught. When she finished, she tossed the empty flask aside and stared into the fire. Victoria watched her, unable to speak. The tough-as-nails hunter had been replaced by an old woman, shrunken and twisted by the weight of unfathomable sorrow. A breeze drifted through the flames, making the shadows around them sway. In that moment, Victoria felt as though they were surrounded by demons on all sides, dancing and laughing in unheard glee at all the agony and suffering they brought into the world. A hollow pit opened in her stomach, black and deep. Cora's pain, carved in deep lines across her face, brought Victoria's own loss back in a suffocating rush, and she fought to contain her tears.
She might have sat there until the fire had burned itself out, overwhelmed by her own helplessness, but the scraping of the hunter's boots across the ground cut through her stupor. Looking up, Victoria found Cora's eyes glistening as they looked at her. "There I was, a widow of her own making, and after Ben and I swore to each other that we'd always watch the other's back."
"You took a vow?"
The firelight outlined the scars running along Cora's cheek as she shook her head. "Never was nothing formal, mind you, but it was there. We was married, after all, and part of having and holding was keeping each other alive, or so I figured. Then I went and broke that promise, and I never been able to make it right in my mind since.
"Anyhow, after I realized what I'd done, I rode down that son of a bitch Glava and made him pay. Shot him and stabbed him and cut his head off, so I know he's dead. George and a whole mess of others seen me do it, too, so I got witnesses. Whoever that feller was back there, he ain't Glava, and that's how I know."
Cora crossed her arms and leaned back against a rock, her eyes studying the younger woman's face. Tension flowed from those dark eyes, and Victoria shifted uneasily. She wasn't sure what the hunter expected her to do or say.
The enormity of what Cora had just told her defied understanding, yet her mind still wrestled with it, trying to make some sense of it. As terrible as the death of her own parents had been, she had at least been left with the cold comfort of knowing she couldn't have prevented it. She had also had time to mourn them, to make her vows of vengeance and travel to see them fulfilled. Cora had none of those comforts when her husband was killed, and she had to endure the horror of shooting him herself. Victoria couldn't fathom what that would do to a person. That the hunter could have carried on at all spoke volumes about her strength and determination.
Victoria's blue eyes finally lifted to meet the hunter's gaze. "I'm so sorry."
Cora snorted. "I don't need your sorry, missie. Didn't tell you my story for it, neither. I told you so you got a better sense of things when they come up again, as I expect they will. That blue-eyed feller and that woman both know a good deal more than they should, and that don't sit well with me."
"Why not?"
"Could be they know even more than they're letting on, for one," Cora said. "Good Lord only knows what else they learned about me, or even about you. Maybe they know what brought you out here to begin with, and they're planning on using that somehow."
Victoria dropped her gaze. "They already do know that, I'm afraid."
"How's that?"
"I told them why I journeyed here from England when they first captured me," Victoria said.
"What?" Cora asked, leaning forward. "What put it in your head to go and do a fool thing like that?"
"I'm not sure anymore," Victoria replied. "I was terribly frightened, and I don't doubt that that had a great deal to do with my confession. Even still, there were parts of that evening that