Wild Country (The World of the Others #2)- Anne Bishop Page 0,37

go on to the next stop. He’s been waiting to make sure no one needed to board. They want to leave soon to make all their stops before dark.”

“Tell them we appreciate their waiting.”

Jesse Walker took some of the books Lila Gold was carrying, and the two women headed for the Bird Cage Saloon.

“We have to do this for every train from now on?” Virgil asked.

“The humans migrating from Lakeside will have papers. We’ll send them on to the saloon,” Tolya said. “It’s the ones without papers that we need to look at carefully. There is something I need to show you and Kane. Will you be back at the sheriff’s office later this afternoon?”

“I’ll be there.”

But first he was going to go back to the office and strip off the human clothes and shift out of this human skin, and he was going to run and run in order to feel like who, and what, he was.

* * *

* * *

Standing in her office doorway, Scythe brushed a hand over the sapphire dress, enjoying the feel of the material. Not quite like the pictures of dresses worn in a frontier saloon, but close enough for now. Garnet Ravengard and Pearl Owlgard had found a shop where humans had had their pictures taken wearing frontier costumes and had found some clothing that looked appropriate for a saloon. They brought back all the costumes they could find and chose two outfits each. They also brought back dresses they thought might suit the owner of a saloon.

Did they know what she was, know what she could do to any of them? All of them?

The desire to belong had to be stronger than the compulsion to feast. Most of her kind didn’t have enough control. Better to feed and feed until there was nothing left and then move on. But sometimes one of them wanted more—and showed others among their kind that it was possible. Not easy. Never easy. But possible.

It took years to learn how to have that control. Years and mistakes. Villages devastated by a mysterious illness, where there might be a single survivor who ended up with a dead eye after glimpsing a black-haired stranger heading away from the village—a stranger who was too sated on the lives already consumed to take one more.

Or a crop bursting with life and ready for harvest—and the whole field changed to dead and rotting plants overnight.

It took years to learn how to sip a little life energy from many and even eat food the way a human would.

She might have settled in one of the little towns that had been emptied of humans—towns the terra indigene had reclaimed—and lived on whatever she could find until fresh prey arrived in the form of two-legged scavengers. She had been heading toward one of them when she came across the strange girl bleeding out on the side of the road. The girl should have been prey but wasn’t.

She hadn’t known about the sweet bloods, the humans who weren’t prey because they were Namid’s creation, both wondrous and terrible.

That day, Scythe had felt the life force flickering in the girl and knew there wasn’t much left to harvest, even if she hadn’t felt uneasy. But she’d crouched beside the girl, careful not to touch the blood.

“You live in Bennett,” the girl had said. “You wear pretty dresses and run a saloon. You have friends. Yellow bird.”

“I’m a Harvester. A Plague Rider. You think I’ll be wanted in a town?”

“You help protect the town.” The girl breathed out the words “black stones” and died.

Scythe picked up the girl and carried her away from the road. Hid the body under stones and brush. And then she found her way to Bennett.

The Sanguinati who ran the town and the Wolves who were the enforcers didn’t trust her but they had agreed to let her stay, let her run this place. Eventually they might even accept her living among them—as long as she could resist the compulsion to devour all the life force of a being that mattered to the Sanguinati and Wolves.

Yuri Sanguinati, one of the saloon’s two bartenders and the only one working today, turned toward her when she stepped out of the office to join him behind the bar.

“Tolya is sending some humans our way,” Yuri said. “Potential workers and residents.”

“From Lakeside?” Barbara Ellen had stopped in a couple of times to say hello and show her how to take care of Yellow Bird, and had told her