on such a difficult path. Her daughter. Emily and Komé, each a reflection of the other—a daughter who had lost a mother, and a mother who had lost a daughter. Their sadnesses interlocked as precisely as two halves of a broken bowl.
Releasing a trembling thread of breath, closing her eyes, Emily surrendered herself to the washing sounds of distant song. Fingers of power threaded around her body, trickling over her skin. She felt as if she were floating, warm breezes from below buoying her up.
In the center of her mind Emily saw the form of the Maien, kneeling, radiant. The old woman had something in her arms, and she was wrestling with it. Sometimes it looked like a baby, sometimes like a wildcat. The Maien crooned to it soothingly, but still it struggled ferociously against her.
“Komé?” Emily whispered.
The Maien’s head came up quickly, her eyes black as pitch. And Emily suddenly saw the thing she was holding. It was a huge ball of blackness, writhing and foul, bubbling and boiling and churning. It wanted to swallow her, Emily realized with horror. She could not hold it for long …
Emily shrieked, forced her eyes open, jerked her hands back. They stung as if they’d been dipped in acid. She pressed them flat against the cool granite. Stanton, too, shook his hands as if his fingers had been singed.
Breathing hard, Emily stared at him for a long, silent moment, before blurting: “What was that?”
“She was fighting with something, did you see? Something fierce. Something terrible.”
“Is that the stone?” Emily said. “The consciousness of it?”
“I don’t know. But it’s dangerous, whatever it is. And she’s protecting you against it.”
Emily looked at her hand, at the stone glimmering in it. A chill chased down her spine.
“I always figured it was powerful,” she said, “but I never thought it was dangerous.”
“The two often go together,” Stanton said.
There was a moment of silent contemplation, which Emily broke with a sudden peal of laughter. Stanton’s eyes focused on her with a spark of annoyance.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’ve never heard you say the words ‘I don’t know’ before.” Emily cocked her head. “They suit you.”
Stanton stood, brushing dirt from the knees of his trousers. “I think you’ll find they lose their charm over time,” he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Wages of Sin
They rode hard all day, the horses trudging back up the Sierra’s steep flanks. They skirted Auburn, stopping only for a few hours’ sleep in the darkest part of the night before pushing on toward Dutch Flat. When they reached it, they rode well around, the horses picking their way along a cow trail on the ridge above town. Suppertime smells drifted up from the houses below, making Emily’s stomach rumble.
“I don’t suppose we could sneak down for a hot meal?”
Stanton shook his head, though it was clear the suggestion was tempting.
“I’m sure the Maelstroms headed for Lost Pine the minute we gave them the slip. Dutch Flat is the closest train station to Lost Pine. We don’t want to show our faces anywhere the Maelstroms might have been.”
The settlement of New Bethel was about ten miles east of Dutch Flat, nestled in a wide, swampy valley between two high ridges that enfolded it like greedy arms. The town was perched on the edge of a dismal marsh that was tall with winter hay. Emily had never been to New Bethel, and her first impression was how odd it was that the town just seemed to … start. It had no outskirts. Other towns had seedy establishments crowding the edges—rowdy saloons, gambling dens with faded signs in Chinese, rickety buildings that could be counted on as whorehouses.
But in New Bethel, the first building on the main road was a tidy little bank, built of buff stone. Which led to Emily’s second distinct impression of New Bethel: it was so strangely clean. Every building looked freshly painted. No litter on the street, no sloppy piles of firewood, no broken-down wagons in need of repair. Everything was neatly stacked, arranged, and organized. And it wasn’t just disorder that seemed to be banished from the town. Ornamentation, decoration, superfluity of any kind was also completely absent. There were no milk pots planted with gardenias, no lace curtains at the windows. It was as though the town had been ordered from a catalogue and assembled by someone with a gun to his head.
The streets were dead still. This was, Emily supposed, not unusual in a small town at suppertime. But as they came around