Chapter Text
Dusk fell over the flat expanse of arid land as a dust storm howled across the Great Plains of Eastern Colorado, obscuring anything within a few feet. The evening was tinted blue and the lone rider tugged a crimson neckerchief up higher over the lower half of her face as she narrowed her eyes.
The sand was fine and stinging against exposed skin, her green eyes gritty as she blinked furiously, ducking her head so the wide brim of her brown gambler’s hat sheltered her better. The dappled grey mare kicked up clouds of dust in her wake and there was an eerie silence to the evening.
Nothing stirred, nothing made a sound, nothing but the wind and the quiet plodding sound of her own horse’s hooves. Lena licked her dry lips beneath the neckerchief, her worn fingerless gloves tightening on the reins as unease made her skin prickle.
Removing one hand, she let her fingers reassuringly brush against the revolved holstered at her hip. The Colt Peacemaker was one of her most cherished possessions, the grip made from yellowed bone and loaded with six bone-tipped bullets. Her hand drifted to her other hip, where a small leatherbound book dangled reassuringly from the wide brown belt buckled around her waist. Between those two things, Lena had everything she needed.
It did little to chase away the feeling of wrongness as she urged her horse onwards though. She’d been this way before, passed through the nearby town to the wariness and suspicion that accompanied all Witch Doctors, and she’d been riding all day, saddle-sore and exhausted.
They were a mile out, and as she closed the distance, Lena’s skin started to crawl as a jolt of panic shot through her, an involuntary response from something hidden. Tugging on her reins, she reeled the mare back and brought them to a stop, her heart hammering in her chest as she tried to see through the clouds of dust and waning sunlight. Something wasn’t right.
The outskirts of the town were still shrouded from her when she caught the acrid odour of smoke and slowly eased her revolver from its holster. Pulling back the hammer, it clicked, the sound seeming too loud in the silence as she dragged in a rattling breath, her throat parched and skin clammy with a cold sweat.
Shifting the gun to her left hand, Lena reached for the little book, thick and heavy with warped pages, and let it fall open in her lap. Flipping to a blank page, she felt for the hidden blade in the folded back cuff of her leather duster and raked the lightly scarred fingertips of her right hand across it.
Beads of blood welled up immediately, the all too familiar dull flare of pain gone almost as quickly as it had arrived, and Lena quickly started scrawling symbols on the paper. It soaked up her blood greedily, the smudges of dark red ghastly as they dried.
Once she’d finished writing the last symbol, the spell was complete and Lena felt the spark of magic tether her to it, her blood singing in her veins. Tearing the page free, she let the book slip off her lap and dangle from her waist, urging her horse on with the gentle squeeze of her knees.
The first houses were just shadows through the dust, but Lena breathed in the choking smoke and caught flickers of orange firelight, a sign that whatever had happened here was fresh. But then came the cloying smell of flesh that had been baking all day in the heat and the coppery tang of blood she would’ve recognised anywhere, and Lena felt that thrum of alarm again as she kept ahold of the tether of magic, crumpling the paper in her right hand.
Stopping halfway down Main Street, a gust of wind blew through, lifting the veil for a moment and giving her a glimpse of burnt husks of the buildings she’d frequented and dead bodies strewn along either side of the muddied street. It was pure carnage, the kind that would’ve made anyone else queasy, but Lena just frowned.
Tightening her grip on her gun, she strained her ears for any other sounds, hearing nothing but the crackling of low-burning fires and the groaning of collapsing houses. No spark of life lingered amidst the town, the much she was sure of as she reached out, feeling the clusters of bones just waiting to be reanimated.
After a tense moment, Lena slid off her horse, murmuring quietly to her, and kept her revolver raised as she cautiously crossed the street. Her pointed, heeled boots sank into blood-softened patches of dirt and Lena reached up to pull down her neckerchief as she licked at her lips, taking in the dragging tracks of red smears that crisscrossed the street. Perhaps worst of all were the chunks of flesh and torn limbs that littered the dusty road.
Sinking down onto her haunches at a mauled body, Lena reached out to ease the deceased person over, her throat constricting at the deep furrows gouged into the young man’s face and chest, his shirt torn and bloodied as he stared sightlessly up at the darkening sky, a cluster of black flies on his blood-flecked lips.
As she eyed his wounds, surprisingly bloodless, despite the brutality of them, Lena quickly came to the conclusion that he’d been dead before he’d received them. His blood had been thick, already black and clotted, when they’d been inflicted, which only meant one thing.
“Blood and bone,” Lena quietly cursed, shooting back up to her feet, the cream leather coat splaying out around her calves as she quickly reevaluated things.
These people had been alive, until as recently as that morning. And in that time, there had been a Necromancer - two by the looks of it - who had passed through the town. Lena connected the dots as her eyes roamed over the chaos, a reenactment of what must have occurred flashing through her mind. They’d fought, each Necromancer slaughtering those they’d needed, before setting the reanimated dead on each other, controlling their corpses like puppets as they’d torn each other to shreds.
A stab of fear lanced through Lena as she considered the fact that she might not be entirely alone, but she couldn’t sense anyone alive. Still, she was alert, on edge at the thought of another Necromancer nearby, one who might be so brutal and careless to do her harm.
It wasn’t uncommon for some of her kind to take the darker route, to use fresh corpses instead of the buried bones taken from graveyards and cemeteries, but she’d rarely seen such bloodshed before. It made her stomach lurch as she turned slowly, looking for a specific corpse.
It took the better part of an hour for her to comb through the scattered dead until she found what she was looking for. Wearing a duster identical to hers - cream leather edged in crimson, the sleeves cuffed and edged with sharp blades - was a man with greying hair and a wrinkled face, a thick moustache covering his top lip, while his eyes stared blankly ahead, unseeing. Around his neck was the same silver medallion Lena wore, the embossed skull over a Triskele , and her mouth thinned with grim sorrow.
A small hole in his lined forehead told her everything she needed to know; he’d been shot dead with one of the spelled bone bullets all Witch Doctors used as a way to ensure someone couldn’t be brought back from the dead. The blood magic used to create the bullet had made sure that he’d never rise again. It also made sure she couldn’t use her blood magic to read his blood, divining what had happened from it.
Climbing to her feet, Lena dusted off her knees and sighed heavily. There was too many dead for her to bury alone, and she couldn’t reanimate any of them either, because each she’d passed by had also been shot in the head with a bone bullet, both Necromancers trying to tip the numbers in their favour, before the dead one at her feet had lost. She didn’t know the man but their ranks had thinned since the Civil War two decades prior, an even greater distrust of her kind accompanying her now after the damage the Necromancers had caused, defiling the dead to win the war. Any losses to the Witch Doctors was a blow.
Reaching into a small pouch at her waist, Lena pulled out a yellowed tooth, the molar worn flat from years of chewing, and she reopened the shallow graze on a fingertip to cover the bone in slick red blood. Clutching it tightly in her hand, her piece of paper discarded to the wind, skittering away with the dust, Lena called on the spark of power inside it.
Tendrils snaked down into the dust and dirt, and she found the singing answer of bones six feet under, ensnaring them with her magic and calling them to life. It was artifice, only her magic giving the skeletons any sort of animation and semblance of sentience as they clawed their way up through the brittle, drought-plagued earth.
Watching as darkness turned the ruined husk of a town to eerie shadows, Lena breathed in the smell of rot and decay, blood and ash, and beneath it all the dust and hay and horse smell of the town before it had been ruined.
Soon enough, she had a small army of the undead, in various states of decay - some fully decomposed to a full skeleton, while others had skin stretched taut over their bones, clumps of hair and disintegrating clothes - and they moved around with their uneven gait, dragging bodies into a pile in the centre of the Main Street.
Maintaining the thread of magic as the tooth slowly wore away, burnt through the ash and picked up again by a long incisor plucked from her pouch, Lena took a set on the blackened steps of what has once been the saloon. Her horse was picketed nearby and Lena had fished a meagre supper from the saddlebags slung across the mare’s back.
Chewing on her smoked jerky and leftover camp bread made the morning before, Lena watched the skeletons move as the wind died down, the dust settling, and a gibbous moon hung overhead, big and luminescent. Cherry red sparks of dying fires pricked the night around her and everything was ghostly pale, the colour leached from the town, and Lena sat with a troubled look clouding her face.
It never boded well to stumble upon such a blatant display of carnage; it usually meant someone didn’t care about the rules of necromancy, or they weren’t professionally trained. Both were troublesome, but Lena preferred ignorance to intent.
Once the bodies were piled high, pale and bloodstained and stiff, remaining limbs twisted at inhuman angles. Lena’s lips twisted ruefully as she finished off her jerky and climbed to her feet, striding over to the pile with her tinderbox in hand, she struck a match on the flint and set it against the tufts of dry grass the skeletons had piled in between the wood and bodies.
It took a while for the flames to properly catch and the fire to blaze, consuming the bodies as the pungent smell of burning flesh and hair filled the town, a cloud of black smoke billowing up from the pyre. It was all Lena could do for them, although it paled in comparison to the service they should’ve had, at the small clapboard church she’d seen them all flock to on Sunday’s. A proper burial in the cemetery she’d summoned half of her skeletons from, buried alongside generations of families.
Ready to go, the foul air and malingering feeling in the air urging her onwards, the nagging thought of the Necromancer still in the area pressuring her to put some distance between the place, Lena paused at the sound of a guttural snarl.
She couldn’t pinpoint it as she looked around, everything bathed in orange light, the shadows long and warped, not until a crow let out a loud caw. It jerked her attention upwards, startling her, and Lena’s stomach lurched at the sight of a small boy hanging from a rope tied the post strung with the wiring for telegrams.
The hairs on the back of her neck standing on end, Lena took a cautious step closer, tipping her head back to look up at the small figure. He couldn’t have been more than five, his feet kicking as the crow pecked at his cheek. He wasn’t alive , that much was true, but he moved anyway, a choked, rasping sound escaping his mouth.
Feeling queasy, Lena reached for her gun and aimed it at the length of rope, firing a shot that burned right through the fraying hemp. The boy crumpled to the ground in a twisted heap, the angles of his limbs all wrong, and yet he swayed to his feet and stared ahead. His skin was like chalk and eyes were a milky white and the air rushed out of Lena as her expression crumpled, her stomach sinking.
He’d been turned into a wight. While not revived back to full life, the child existed as a shadow of his former self, his movements autonomous, unlike the skeletons that acted on orders alone. There was nothing there though, no soul attached to his small body, and Lena’s mouth thinned with a grave look of regret, knowing there would be no way to bring him back now. Even if he hadn’t been made into a wight , his soul would have fled too far for her to bring back.
Letting out a weary sigh, her shoulders dropping, she adjusted her grip on the bone-handled gun and levelled it at his blond head. Drawing in a deep breath, she pulled the trigger, the sound momentarily deafening as the recoil jerked her back slightly, and through the haze of smoke, Lena watched the small boy crumpled to the ground.
Cradling his limp body in her arms, she carried him over to the pyre and set him down on top, her pale face hard as her mouth flooded with the sour taste of bile. The smell of gunpowder and metal clung to her bloody fingertips and she spat out the bitter taste before running the leather sleeve of her duster across her mouth.
Moving back over to her horse, Lena holstered her gun and tossed the crumbling remains of the last tooth to the ground and swung herself up onto the saddle. She was sore and tired and covered in dust, but no comfort would be found in a town of ghosts.
Taking a swig of water, rinsing her mouth out and then swallowing a cool mouthful, mercifully soothing her parched throat, Lena grasped the reins in her hands. Digging her blunt spurs gently into the horse’s flank, Lena pulled her neckerchief back up over her face.
“Come, Hecate,” she murmured, leaning forward to pat the side of the mare’s neck, urging her into motion. “Dinner is waiting.”
Galloping out of the town, Lena put a few miles between herself and the fire, a bright beacon against the night, before she stopped. It was already dark, the sky speckled with millions of stars through the haze of dust as the wind started back up again.
She’d stopped near a grassy area so Hecate could graze, the sloped foothills at the base of the sprawling mountains that spread across the horizon to her back. Using the wood of a dead tree, bleached white from the sun, she made a small fire and warmed herself as a coffeepot brewed over the flames.
It was late, but Lena needed the coffee for the surge of energy, the blood magic leaving her fingers cold and hands shaking. Even the fire couldn’t make it stop and she busied herself with sorting through the wooden case of supplies, counting teeth and coins and medical instruments and herbs.
Once she’d finished two bitter cups of coffee, grateful for the trade route out west, where she’d picked it up off a merchant travelling through the south, Lena fed oats to Hecate and brushed down her grey coat, smoothing the powerful muscles of the horse’s flanks as she murmured soothing things to her. Hecate was perhaps even more valuable to Lena than her Colt and grimoire, the only thing that stood between life and death out in the wilderness. Lena cared for her with fastidious attention, checking her hooves and making sure she never wore her down to the point of exhaustion.
Bedding down for the night, Lena banked the fire after spreading out her bedroll, her spare clothes, ammunition, the last book she’d traded for at a Waypoint and the small amount of money she travelled with. Everything else - her tin cup and plate, the fork and spare horseshoe, canteen and rope and the supplies of her craft - was hung off the saddlebags or stowed in the small wooden box, nicked and worn from years of use.
Her booted feet could feel the belongings at the end of the bedroll, but Lena just curled in on herself and drew the gum blanket over herself, the vulcanised rubber outer layer a durable protection from the hard ground and any rain that might fall during the night.
Waking with the sun the following morning, Lena warmed beans with hard biscuits for breakfast before throwing the thick blanket of Hecate’s back and saddling her. It took her the better part of an hour to pack up, everything neatly rolled up inside her gum blanket, the box buckled onto the back of the saddle, and the bags and riding gear all double-checked to make sure everything was buckled and tight.
Swiftly braiding her dark hair, Lena flipped her gamblers hat back down on her head and swung herself up into the saddle.
The dust storm from the evening before had let up and she made good time heading south, the sky violet as the sun rose, a ball of orange on the horizon. It was still relatively cool, but beneath the open sky, Lena knew she’d be sweating before long. Still, she thundered onwards, occasionally stopping at the sight of a ribbon of blue, watering Hecate and refilling her canteen before pressing onwards.
At the beginning of the Sangre de Cristo range off to the west, Lena made for a pass between the mountains. Crossing the Great Sand Dunes, undulating waves of golden sand, a wind whipping it up into a frenzy as she bent down low over the horse’s neck, she aimed for the alpine desert before her.
Trees and marshland, swampy areas and lakes and warm springs dotting the miles of land as the San Luis Valley spread out before her. Most of it was cut through with irrigation lines and wagon roads by that time, making the crossing that much easier for Lena, even though she spent two out there.
At night, she turned off the road and made camp in the swampy marshlands, dense willow offering a warm shelter for her and the elk and mule deer milling about. Lena left them undisturbed, too much meat for her to consume alone in such a short amount of time, and too much weight to burden Hecate with.
The riparian habitat homed a wide variety of trees, shrubs, streamside vegetation and perennials and Lena enjoyed the slow, meandering ride along the rutted paths. Hawks wheeled overhead and waterfowl sought refuge in the tall grasses, while cutthroat trout swam upstream, snagged on Lena’s fishing line and gutted and fried for dinner.
It was early spring, the dogwood and greasewood already flowering, chokecherry budding, with sumac, wax currant and bitterbrush braving the cold hardiness of the alpine desert. And as she came out on the other side, four days after the massacre, in the upper regions of the Alamosa were aspens and blue spruce, lodgepole pines and junipers.
Taking the wide pass in the San Juan Mountains, Lena turned slightly northwards. There was a Waypoint in the Red Mountains pass that she was familiar with, hidden from the mining camps sprouting up everywhere in the region as the gold and silver rush brought everyone out west.
She passed through more than one town in the middle of putting down permanent roots, townsfolk working on a new church, the buildings pristinely painted in pale blue and yellow, gleaming white or plain, sanded wood. Suspicious glances sent her on her way without stopping.
It was another couple of days of riding, and Lena was running low on provisions, the hard biscuits so hard that she had to soak them in warm water or crush them up in her oats. The salted pork was all she had left as night closed in a week since she’d passed through the ghost town, tough and bland but enough to get her through to the pass.
On a dusty track halfway up the mountains, there was an even narrower path, one used by the big horned sheep that populated the area, and Hecate plodded along faithfully as Lena took in the sprawling view. Colorado was much greener than New Mexico and she welcomed the fresh vegetation and abundant streams and rivers after months spent in the orange deserts to the south.
On a small shelf of grey rock and hard-packed earth, a dozen crude stone headstones stood before the mouth of a dark cave. Pines and aspens dotted the shelf, squirrels scurrying about and an eagle nesting in the branches of a particularly tall spruce.
Tying Hecate to the trunk of a nearby tree, Lena ducked her head as she walked into the dark, dankness of the cave’s narrow hallway. The rough-hewn walls were suffocatingly close, worming back and forth slightly, and she could feel the bones ahead of her as she moved deeper inside.
It opened into a large cavern, smelling richly of damp earth and blood, and Lena squinted at the orange glow of gaslight as she stopped on the threshold of entering.
“I can feel you there. Enter.”
Lena obeyed the command and stepped fully into the chamber, half a dozen hallways leading from it, and watched as a familiar woman exited one of them. Her name was Selena, a retired Witch Doctor fulfilling her duty to maintain a Waypoint, and Lena gave her a terse nod.
Lighting another gas lamp, Selena held it up and Lena could see that her hand was stained with blood as the yellow glow illuminated the older woman’s bronze skin and dark hair.
“Supplies?”
“Food. Perhaps a few teeth.”
“Any tokens?”
Lena shook her head. There hadn’t been any cause to use the thick, piedfort coins, embossed with the same symbol that was on her medallion, minted with the blood of the creator. She hadn’t performed any resurrections this month.
“No, ma’am. No living to pay the way for the dead I’ve crossed paths with lately.”
Selena hummed as she drifted to various shelves, removing a handful of teeth from a glass jar and pushing them into Lena’s hand. They were safely tucked away in her pouch which Selena fetched food for her, brought down by traders that the Order paid to deliver to the Waypoints.
Setting the book she’d borrowed at the last point she’d stopped on a shelf lined with others, Lena peered through the dimness as her fingertips brushed the spines of the collection available. Various books on death and herblore, rituals and ancient necromancy practices. Almanacks of symbols and tomes of their history.
“I’ve seen trouble out there,” Selena said after a moment.
Lena stiffened, her finger placed on the spine of a thin black volume on death practices in Ancient Egypt. Slipping the book from the shelf, she gripped it tight enough for her knuckles to whiten as she turned to face the woman.
“What kind of trouble?”
“I’m unsure. Have you seen anything unusual?”
Clenching her teeth, Lena stared at the woman from beneath the brim of her wide hat and nodded slowly. “A town a week’s ride from here. Everyone was torn up with a bone bullet put in their heads. No chance of bringing them back.”
“Two Necromancers,” Selena murmured.
“One of our brethren was amongst them. I took his medallion, but I didn’t know him.”
Lena pulled the silver medallion and the long chain from a coat pocket, letting it catch the lamplight as it swung in the air between them. Selena snatched it from her and ran her fingers over it to check for blood, even the smallest, lingering fleck of it.
“He was killed with a bullet too. He’ll be long gone from any blood magic that might reach his soul, I reckon.”
Casting her a dark look, Selena’s expression soured. “Then I will see it through your blood.”
Mouth pressed into a flat line, Lena set the book down on the stone table slab in the centre of the room, where her wrapped food had been placed. Removing the scarred fingerless gloves and pushing up the sleeve of her cream coat and grey linen shirt, Lena yanked her Bowie knife from its sheath at her thigh and presented it.
Clicking her tongue, Selena shook her head and took the knife with a look of distaste on her face. “You young ones are so crude in your ways; you have lost all subtlety and finesse. A butcher’s knife is an indelible thing for such esteemed work.”
Lena gave her a crooked grin as the old Witch Doctor used the point of the knife to dig into the meaty flesh at the base of Lena’s thumb. Masking a wince at the flare of pain, Lena tensed and grit her teeth, watching as her palm filled with a slow trickle of blood.
Returning her knife to her, which Lena neatly sheathed as Selena gripped her other wrist, the old woman hunched over Lena’s palm, a tooth rolling between her fingers, stained with Lena’s blood, as she tethered her magic to Lena’s blood. Lena was silent, her heart pounding in her chest as she watched Selena closely, each moment feeling like an eternity.
Eventually, the woman drew back and stared at Lena for a long moment. Her dark eyes were unreadable but bright, and Lena arched an eyebrow in question.
“Well?”
“It is as you said,” she finally relented, using the last of the tooth to close the beaded cut on Lena’s hand.
Swiftly rising to her feet, Selena busied herself with fetching other things for Lena, most surprising being a withered apple and a pouch of cinnamon, scarcities that weren’t handed out easily. Especially not to someone like Lena, an accomplished Necromancer with a reputation that someone a decade her senior would be lucky to have. She was not a friendly person and she knew that Selena bore her no good fortune, so the gifts caught her off guard.
As Selena fetched a few medicinal herbs and extra bone bullets, Lena curled her hand around the drying blood and stared at her back with the growing sense of unease.
“Were you able to divine who did it?”
“No,” came the clipped reply.
“Then was there anything of my fate?”
Then there was a moment of hesitation before Selena turned around and gave her a piercing stare. “I saw you heading north-east. Towards Ouray.”
Despite her reservations about the woman’s dislike of her, she was the guardian of a Waypoint, one who had taken up the call earlier than most, and was to be respected. Selena had a reputation as well, and had trained a few apprentice Witch Doctor’s in her time. To ignore her advice would be a sign of hubris, so after a slight pause, Lena nodded.
“I thank you for your counsel.”
“Heed it well.”
Gathering up her new supplies, Lena left without another word, the feeling of someone breathing down her neck following her the whole way back through the twisting, cramped passageway.
Stepping out into the intense sunshine, Lena swiftly packed everything away and swung up onto the back of her horse, staring at the dark mouth of the cave entrance as she urged Hecate into motion.
Picking her way back down the mountain pass, Lena took the northbound route, riding with the comfortable ease of someone who’d spent years in the saddle. Normally, she would’ve been more relaxed, but she was vigilant as she rode through the mountains, listening to the birdsong and the distant bleats of sheep, the wind blowing up clouds of dirt as Hecate trotted along.
The weather turned bitter as Lena followed a switchback beaten track up the side of a mountain, still snow-capped but already melting as spring headed towards summer. It would be mere weeks now before the weather warmed, and while it wasn’t quite the drought-ridden desert to the south and west, Colorado was still arid and Lena knew it would be hard work travelling the old routes in the heat. Especially if no one called on her for a resurrection, divination or for manual work.
Still, she stayed the course, dutifully pressing onwards as one of the prestigious Witch Doctors, trained at the Graveyard and apprenticed to her brother, which, admittedly hadn’t been for the best, but had left her with more knowledge and practical skill than she’d ever need. She had been something of a prodigy when her mother had dropped her off at the Graveyard for training, abandoning her to the underbelly of Calvary Cemetery in New York.
It had been a harrowing schooling, spent digging graves for those who died of influenza and tuberculosis for the better part of six months. She’d been nine, skinny as a rake and oddly silent. It had been laborious work that had prepared her for the horrors of bloated bodies and mangled flesh, the dappled bruised skin of those who had been long dead before winding up at the cemetery.
It was how the Order made its living for a long while, taking money to bury the dead that were ferried across from Manhattan. For a larger fee, the wealthy would bring their deceased beloveds to the sealed doors of the grimy mausoleum and the acolytes of the Graveyard would take them down below. Soon enough, the dead that had been taken below to the cold and fetid bowels of the cemetery would leave on their own two feet, blinking in confusion, completely unaware of what had happened to them.
She’d spent six years there, in the Graveyard, skulking through the hallways below the overflowing rows of graves above her, learning to feel the spark of each bone in the bodies buried there. There had been nighttime lessons where she’d been taken up above ground to call the dead from their graves, the small children of poor Irish immigrants who hadn’t been able to pay for their resurrection crawling from their graves, commanded by her as blood ran from her nose and eyes, her hand clutched around a tooth.
And there had been medical lessons too, the fresh cadavers brought straight under instead of buried, sliced open and studied until she knew every bone, muscle, tendon and nerve that held a body together. With a bit of blood, some bone and a piedfort coin, she could bring someone back by the time she was fifteen.
After that, her brother had turned up, garbed in a black suit and a frock coat, astride a black horse that was double Lena’s height. She’d been apprenticed to him then, taken out south to the war-torn states, travelling on her pony as she helped him with his tasks, feeling like he’d become a stranger to her in their years apart.
At the end of three years, she’d earned herself her medallion and become a fully-fledged Witch Doctor, supplied with everything she’d need to practice her craft. In her cream duster lined with crimson, she’d felt proud and prepared, using the small stipend she’d been given to buy her first horse, a smoky grey gelding she’d named Osiris. They’d headed back out west together, the eastern cities too crowded and already claimed by territorial Witch Doctors with the practices they’d had in the family for decades.
It had been rough living since then, but Lena liked the solitude - appreciated it, in fact - and she liked the opportunity to see new places. To be trapped in dark, airless places, confining and cramped seemed like a nightmare to her now, especially after so many years beneath the open sky. Lena was content to follow the trade routes, even if it didn’t pay as well as the fortunes that could be made back over east, but what would she use the money for anyway? Everything she needed was freely given to her at the dispersed Waypoints, or bought with her stipend. The food was simple fare and sometimes rarely edible, but she wasn’t the only one of her kind to try their hand out west, hundreds of her brethren roving around the mid-western states.
She hadn’t seen any alive since the over a month ago, a woman she’d studied with at the Graveyard, fresh off the boat from Tibet, her merchant father trading tea and silk and nankeen in New York. Lena had no lost love for Veronica Sinclair, the other woman harbouring an intense dislike for her on accounts of her prodigal status at the school.
In a saloon in Gallup, New Mexico, when Lena had been on her way up to Mesa Verde, she’d crossed paths with Veronica, drinking moonshine as they gambled with the locals over games of cards. Cleaning everyone out, the two Necromancers had incited a brawl and fled their separate ways once guns were drawn.
It had been a series of small mining towns along the mineral belt since then before heading east. Only one person had paid for a resurrection - the widowed mine owner could afford the fee to have his young wife brought back after childbirth gone wrong had left him with a motherless newborn - and she’d moved on. Until she’d reached that town, no trouble had dogged her.
But as she came upon San Juan National Park, cutting through it and up towards the Rocky Mountains, she had the nagging thought that something was amiss. Whether it involved her directly, or she was a bystander to it, Lena didn’t know.
It wasn’t until she was a few miles outside of Telluride, the mining town in the box canyon, surrounded by forested peaks, that trouble found her.
Lena knew the town, of course, had passed through it a couple of times, finding it well-stocked on account of the Smuggler gold vein and placer gold in the nearby San Miguel River. It boasted many saloons and brothels, gambling halls and hotels and access to telegrams, making it easier to send messages for jobs to nearby towns. She made a pretty penny there helping revive the miners that could afford it, friends scrounging up gold to pay for it.
She wasn’t here to stop this time though, too busy wondering what she would find in Ouray, a little more north-east of Telluride. Although Selena hadn’t been specific about what she’d find there, only sending her in that direction, Lena had been on the lookout ever since she’d set out from the Waypoint.
It was as she was descending into the valley, hoping to take the wider wagon road that had opened up sometime between her first and second visit, that she was caught unawares.
The sun was already sinking, the trees casting long shadows and a chill creeping into the day as Telluride lay obscured by fog and dust far below. She was riding along with little care for what might be lurking in the trees, eating the withered apple she’d been given as Hecate’s hooves plodded wearily down the gently sloping track, when the crack of gunfire reached her ears.
Startled, Lena ducked as Hecate walked on, nothing spooking a horse used to skeletons and the reek of death, and she sharply looked to her left as she watched splintered bark erupt from a tree not two metres from her. Heart seizing in her chest, Lena spit out an apple seed as she pulled her gun from its holster.
It was fully loaded, the weight of it comfortable in her gloved hand, and her eyes darted about as she looked for the perpetrator. She didn’t have time to craft a spell, but Lena dug out a tooth from her pouch and pricked her finger on the hidden blade to soak it, reaching out for the nearby buried skeleton of some lost fool who had fallen or given up.
Nudging Hecate onwards, unwilling to stop and make herself an easy target, Lena hunched low over her saddle as listened to the clacking sound of bones following after her. The smell of rot and rich earth clung to the rattling skeleton with its grinning skull, and she sent it questing ahead as she urged her horse into a quicker pace.
The next bullet sounded off to her right, from further down the valley and slightly above her, and wisps of Lena’s dark hair whipped around her face as she tipped the brim of her hat up and squinted, a scowl darkening her face. And there, a flicker of motion as a brown horse was urged into motion, charging right for her.
As Lena grabbed another two teeth, her bloodied fingers sparking the burning magic inside them, she bolted, thundering down the track at a reckless speed that was dangerous. All it would take was a loose stone or snaking root for Hecate to break a leg and leave Lena to her own devices. But she couldn’t let up, because the only thought that consumed her mind as skeletons clawed their way up through the track, causing a flimsy distraction to slow the woman behind her, was that it was another Witch Doctor, wearing the same duster that she was.
Cursing, Lena guided her horse straight into the brush at the hairpin curve of the trail, trampling brush and shrubs as low-hanging branches whipped at her cheeks, leaving shallow cuts across her pale skin. At the sight of a rocky outcropping, she led Hecate around it and swung off her saddle, slapping the horse to send her on her way, knowing she’d come back when called, and grappled at the rough stone of a boulder as she heaved herself upwards.
It wasn’t a very tall outcropping of rocks, or wide, just jutting out of the cliff enough to make the slope a little treacherous below. Gun in hand, Lena breathed heavily as she waited, hearing the galloping hooves thundering closer and closer with each passing second, preceded by the guttural barking of multiple dogs.
The dogs raced past first, two scruffy staghounds, their eyes milky - a sure sign that they’d been brought back as wights - and both in varying states of decay. One’s ribs were fully exposed on one side of its rib cage, and the flesh of the other’s muzzle and hind leg was almost fully receded. They were gazehounds, hunting on sight and speed alone, and so they didn’t see Lena perched high above as they shot past.
Neither did the Witch Doctor, galloping past on her brown stallion. And she didn’t see Lena dive off of the boulders either, slamming into her and taking her clean out of the saddle, both of them crashing onto the blanket ground of the mountain with a sickening crunch.
The momentum forced them to go sliding down the side of the slope in a jumble of limbs, neither of them able to disentangle themselves as rocks and branches dug into them, knocking the air from their lungs and no doubt leaving bruises. It wasn’t until they came to a natural stop that they were able to scramble backwards from each other, but not before the staghounds had followed their mistress and come chasing after them.
Lena snarled as one of them clamped its mangy jaws over her arm, piercing the leather of her duster. Aiming the gun at it, she shot it through the head and scrambled to her feet, watching as it dropped lifelessly to the ground, while the others' hackles rose.
Raising her gun again, she felt the press of a rifle against her back. “I wouldn’t do that if I was you.”
Stiffening at the voice, flat and sceptical, Lena swallowed thickly and held her hands up, thinking fast.
“Now, turn around slowly.”
Obeying, Lena caught her first glimpse of the other woman up close. Light brown hair, hazel eyes, tanned skin. She was pretty. There was a trustworthy softness to her face that was at odds with the rifle pointed at Lena’s stomach.
“Who are you?”
“I don’t answer to no one ‘round these parts,” the woman said with a ghost of a smile. “Least of all your kind.”
Jerking her chin at her in a haughty manner, Lena’s eyes dropped to the silver medallion hanging around her neck. “Last time I checked, we were of the same kind, miss.”
“That ain’t what the orders that came through two nights ago say.”
Lena’s brow crumpled with bewilderment and the woman cocked back the bolt and then jerked it forward, loading another cartridge.
“You’ve got a bounty on your head,” she stated matter-of-factly, a grim solemnity hardening her face. “I intend to collect it.”
“Hold on now,” Lena uneasily started, her eyes widening a fraction as she took a slow step backwards. “A bounty? What bounty? I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I’m afraid I ain’t got time to listen to the lies of a rogue.”
“Rogue?” Lena spluttered.
It was all she managed to get out before the woman raised the rifle and Lena realised with sudden panic that she was actually going to shoot her. Staring down the barrel for a fleeting moment, Lena hesitated for the briefest second before she flung herself down the mountain, the cracking sound of the bullet firing making her ears ring as it whistled over her head.
She couldn’t control her descent, staggering to her feet and then bowling over at the momentum of her speed, crashing through the bushes as she listened to the barking overhead. Dizzy and bruised and bloodied, Lena blinked back black spots when she finally came to a stop, the ground tilting as she staggered to her feet and lurched forward to grasp at a tree for balance.
Looking up, she caught sight of the Witch Doctor braving the treacherous slope down to her, rifle balanced against her shoulder. Lena must’ve fallen a hundred feet, and it took her a moment to gather her bearings before she let out a shrill whistle and started running again.
Carving furrows as she slid down the leaf-strewn slope, she caught sight of Hecate crashing through the trees to her left and swerved as another shot rang out. This time, Lena wasn’t so lucky - or perhaps lucky that she’d moved instead of letting the bullet find its mark in her spine - and she felt the searing heat of pain in the right side of her abdomen as the bullet found its mark.
A hoarse shout fell from her lips as she grit her teeth, the breath catching in her throat, and nearly tripped over her own feet as her body went numb. As Hecate neared her, Lena dragged herself up into the saddle, a low groan working its way up her throat at the white-hot pain that nearly made her pass out, and she urged the horse into motion as soon as her feet were in the stirrups.
She could feel the blood soaking into her linen shirt but Lena didn’t stop for anything. She didn’t holster her gun or return to the path or even allow herself a drink of water to rinse the taste of dirt and bile from her tongue. Anxious that she was being chased, long after the sound of barks faded behind her, Lena didn’t stop for the rest of the day.
Heading north, she pushed Hecate until the horse was foaming at the mouth, her hide lathered with sweat, and only then did she bring them to a halt, near a narrow stream. Allowing the horse to drink for a few minutes, Lena gave herself the chance to refill her canteen and wet her parched throat before she had them moving again, albeit at a slower pace.
As the hours dragged by and a bright moon hung heavy overhead, Lena felt cold and numb and stiff as they plodded onwards, swaying in the saddle as she didn’t even have the time or effort to heal herself. That would require stopping long enough to write a spell, and she didn’t think she could spare the blood at the moment.
A storm had started up, a deluge of rain soaking her through, leaving her shivering as she clung to the reins, letting Hecate take her in whichever direction she decided. Lightning briefly illuminated the darkness in intermittent bursts, revealing the shadows of hills and far off mountains, and the broad expanse of flat, grassy plains as each jolting footstep sent a stab of pain through Lena’s stomach. Despite the loud peals of thunder, Lena felt her leaden eyes closing and her mind drifting in and out.
It wasn’t until she stumbled open a ranch in one of her bouts of consciousness that she stopped, wondering if there was a town she hadn’t been to before ahead. It was miles past Ouray, on the mineral strip near the foothills of mountains ripe for mining and plains for horses and sheep and cattle. Lena didn’t know whether she’d find anywhere hospitable ahead, and she pulled the reins to guide Hecate towards the dark shadowed building.
The horse was exhausted and Lena was swimming in and out of consciousness again, barely staying in the saddle, and although it was nearing upon midnight, Hecate’s hooves too loud in the stillness, the door to the ranch creaked open.
For the second time that day, a woman levelled a rifle at Lena as she stood on the porch of the long, low house, an indistinguishable shadow in the dark.
“Who’s there?” the voice called out, firm and courageous. “Name yourself or I’ll shoot.”
Lena was fading from consciousness, her lips moving soundlessly, and she barely had the energy to straighten in the saddle before the bolt sliding home sounded. And for the second time that day, Lena was shot, the bullet grazing the side of her neck and unseating her as pain blossomed and she finally succumbed to the darkness for good.
Splayed out in the mud as the rain hammered down on her, Lena blacked out as vivid red blood was washed away in streaks. Pale and small, she made a sorry, unthreatening sight - enough so that the woman stepped out into the rain and crossed the mud to stand over her.
Blonde hair plastering to her tanned face, the woman peered down at Lena with the rifle clutched tightly in her hands, reloaded and ready to shoot. And with a slow movement, she reached out to loop the fine silver chain around Lena’s neck over the smoking barrel of the gun, her blue eyes widening at the insignia emblazoned on the medallion.
Looking around with a helpless look of concern on her face, the night still and empty, save for herself and the unconscious Necromancer - and the docile horse, who looked relieved to be still - Kara Danvers set the butt of her rifle into the soft mud and let out a weary sigh.