Also by Heather M. Herrman

The Corpse Queen

Consumption

Nancy Paulsen Books

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

1745 Broadway, New York, New York 10019

First published in the United States of America by Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2025

Copyright © 2025 by Heather M. Herrman

Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

Nancy Paulsen Books & colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The Penguin colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Books Limited.

Visit us online at PenguinRandomHouse.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Herrman, Heather M., author.

Title: Lady or the tiger / Heather M. Herrman.

Description: New York, New York: Nancy Paulsen Books, 2025. | Audience term: Teenagers | Summary: “In the 1880s, teenage killer Belle King stands trial for murder in the Wild West when her first victim, her husband, arrives alive, upending her plans”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024049563 (print) | LCCN 2024049564 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984816733 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984816740 (ebook)

Subjects: CYAC: Trials (Murder)—Fiction. | Robbers and outlaws—Fiction. | Kansas—History—19th century—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories. | LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Historical fiction. | Western fiction. | Novels.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.H49465 Lad 2025 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.H49465 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024049563

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024049564

ISBN 9781984816733

Ebook ISBN 9781984816740

Cover art © 2025 by Tomasz Majewski

Cover design by Kristin Boyle

Edited by Caitlin Tutterow

Design by Eileen Savage, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68, Ireland, https://eu-contact.penguin.ie.

pid_prh_7.1a_151561850_c0_r0

For my father, who raised two strong women.

I miss you.

And for all the girls with tigers in their hearts.

Feminism comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the slowest.

—Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

Part I

The Wanted

Prologue

You aren’t going to like me.

Don’t worry. By the end of this book, I’ll be dead.

I am telling you so that you can prepare yourself. So that you don’t expect the impossible—a happy ending or a heroine worth rooting for.

Instead, I’m offering you my confession. A true tale of guns and murder and a carnival filled with the souls of the damned.

Of the Wild West and wicked women, and the world’s largest diamond hidden inside a dead man’s chest.

Of Madness and Possession.

But be forewarned. There will be no miraculous ending like in those sappy dime-store novels so fashionable today, where the criminal repents and her soul is saved.

I repent nothing.

And as you greedily gulp down my sins, dear reader, I want you to remember one thing.

No matter what the lawmen tell you, this is a Love Story…

1

The End

Now—Summer 1886

Dodge City, Kansas

Not all little girls are born murderers, but every woman becomes one.

Most simply destroy pieces of themselves—their dreams, their desires, their right to speak to whom and what they please.

I kill men instead.

You see, I rather like my dreams, dark as they are. And my voice is my own. In fact, it has made me a fortune, slipping and sighing its way across the world’s greatest stages, then rising to steal unapologetically from the private opera boxes of the rich. I’ve ruined many a silk shirt with my glass-shattering operettas.

Many a man too.

As of this, my nineteenth year, I’ve killed a dozen men. More, if you count the time I helped my mother.

But right now, there is only one man on my mind. And if I’m not careful, he’ll catch me.

It is midnight, and I stand in the middle of a dirty street in Kansas, letting the ebb and flow of humanity swell against me. The air smells of cow shit and danger. Ladies of ill repute who have been flung here by careless fate, buffalo hunters who kill hundreds of beasts a day without a spark of remorse, and men with no names come to seek riches. Amongst them travel a very few of the land’s original people, nearly washed away now by this crushing wave of greed and guns.

For a moment, I think of running.

I could be in Boston by midweek. Paris in four. I have friends all over the world. Palaces to harbor in. Ancient manors with priceless wine cellars eager to fling their doors open to me. No one could stop me. I could run forever.

But then I see it. The single shadow of a bird, its daylight wings pressed against the moon, where it should not be.

He’s close.

And I know. There is only one place I will be safe.

As for all my performances, I have dressed for the occasion. Wrapped around me is a blanket of pure emerald silk, given to me by a king’s nephew in London. He paid an unspeakable sum for the treasure, hoping I would lay myself upon it like a fine treat waiting to be consumed.

Instead, I’ll spoil it here.

When I was a little girl, I wore a single dress for three years, my mother letting out the hem with each inch I grew until the dirty yellow calico finally fell away from me like a skin I was shedding.

Now I have money enough to buy a dressmaker’s factory. A dead empress’s trousseau if I so choose.

Not that it matters anymore. The dead don’t need dresses.

Overhead, the night is the kind of black that is almost clear, as if someone painted it on the back of a crystal plate. Tiny holes of brilliant light poke through, scattering the sky with stars.

A perfect necklace. Tilting my head back so that they lace my throat, I open my mouth and scream.

Here, on the prairie, there is nothing to stop it, no trees or hills or rivers to dampen the sound. Only a tiny spill of buildings, laughably small against the endless flat land, cobbled together like children’s toys with pasteboard and bricks.

My voice, trained for crowds of thousands, rises easily into the night, filling it, but no one seems to notice.

Screams, in this town, are apparently as common as spurred boots and tobacco spit.

A cowboy brushes against me, stumbling drunk and following the guiding red light of a trainman who uses his lantern’s glow to lead new arrivals to the town’s brothels. Because of this, they’ve started to call this collection of watering holes and entertainment the red-light district. The sound of a shot is followed by the crescendo of a player piano’s canned notes as a saloon door swings open and two gamblers tumble into the street, fists swinging.

It is, overall, a rather rude audience.

The people here are a mix of outlaws and citizens trying to maintain their morals in Gomorrah. Dodge City, the Wickedest Town in America, according to the papers.

But I’m the wickedest of them all.

And I don’t like to be ignored.

I let go of my silk and step into the street. In this moment, I want them to see me in all my power.

I scream again, lifting my voice to the sky like a wild animal. Which is exactly what I am.

Finally, someone pays attention. A startled man with a curled mustache nearly falls off his horse trying to get a better look before stating the obvious. “That girl’s stark naked!”

A ruddy-faced woman who’d been hanging off the porch of the Long Branch Saloon steps out from under a man’s arm and raises a curious eyebrow, sister to sister. She gives a sharp whistle that brings two other girls to her side. One of them is no more than thirteen, black curls frizzing about her pretty brown face. I hope she is not working there, but I know she is. The whistling woman’s hand goes to the breast of her gown, where I’ve no doubt she’s got a pistol tucked between her large breasts, but I ignore her unspoken offer of assistance.

Besides, it’s too late. A crowd is beginning to form, a circle of twenty or so of the wayfarers who’ve swollen this town like a tick on the blood of the frontier’s trade. Two men in dirty miners’ overalls, their reinforced pockets heavy with rocks, press eagerly toward me. It’s not hard to read their thoughts. Why pay for something you can get for free? To them I am a gold nugget glittering in a stream, ready for the taking.

I let them get close enough to touch me.

And then I begin to sing.

I thought long and hard about this, my last song. What should it be? In what key should I sing it? I could give them Offenbach’s Madame Papillon or something from Purcell. Perhaps “Dido’s Lament,” which sent men away from the opera house in Vienna weeping.

Instead, I choose a folk tune. One that used to be sung to me by my mother.

One that, once upon a time, I sang to the first man I killed.

Go to sleep now,

go to sleep now,

birdini, birdini

Go to sleep now,

go to sleep now,

birdini, birdini…

“That ain’t no girl.” The cowboy’s gaze flicks to the Wanted posters with my face stamped upon them. Dead or Alive. I watch dozens of other eyes skitter over.

It’s a poor rendering, unfortunately. There’s a painting of me hanging in a gentleman’s boudoir in Bruges, worth thousands, that’s far more flattering.

Here my chin is far too sharp, and my eyes appear small and close together. There is a hunger in them. A feral innocence that I thought I erased long ago. If I stare too long at the posters, I feel like I might cry. The girl in the drawing does not look like a woman at all. She looks like the frightened child I used to be.

So I don’t look. Instead, I sing.

Louder now, and I know that I have chosen the right song by the silence that surrounds me. It’s a simple song, for simple people, but it is one many of them have heard since they were babies. One their own mothers sang to them. One of love. Of lost innocence. Here, in the moonlight, I see the glint of tears in a cowboy’s eyes, a man, I’ve no doubt, who would not hesitate to put a bullet through the brain of any unwise enough to insult him.

But in this moment, I could reach out and touch his forehead, kiss his cheeks and demand he lay down his guns for the rest of his life, and he would.

There is power in a woman’s voice. More power still when it reaches the ears of men unaccustomed to listening.

I finish the song, and the hush that follows swallows us whole. Crickets and the far-off rumble of thunder, my coda.

There is a disturbance in the crowd as a man steps forward.

He is short, which is why, I’m certain, his hat is so tall. He walks with the tilted swagger of a man with lifts in his too-new boots. And on his chest is a gold star, so shiny I know it’s freshly pinned. This must be the man I’m looking for. Dodge City’s newest sheriff, the man who replaced the famed Wyatt Earp.

“Are you Belle King?” He clears his throat like an awkward schoolboy. “Are you…the Seamstress?”

I straighten to my full height, which is a head taller than his own but, in the moonlight, appears two. It’s a trick I used onstage, throwing my head back and spreading my legs hip distance, sliding my shoulders down on my spine to appear larger than I really am. I’ve heard that cobras do much the same thing before they eat their prey.

I won’t go unnoticed. Not for this, my final performance. I answer him. “Yes.”

A man of more experience would already have taken me into his possession. Or tried to, anyway. This man stands with his mouth hanging open, like he can’t decide whether to cry or fight. Finally, though, he speaks. The crowd around him leans in closer. This is a story they will pass down to their children and their children’s children to come.

The sheriff’s voice is trembling, but to his credit the hand on his gun remains steady. “What do you…what do you want?”

And, naked, nineteen, and with my whole life in front of me, I hold out my wrists and whisper so that only he can hear.

“I want you to arrest me.”

THE NEW YORK GLOBE

August 3, 1886

New York, New York

CAPTURED!!!! FEMALE JESSE JAMES!

BILLY THE KID AS A LADY!

BELLE OR JEZEBEL?

MURDERESS ACCUSED OF TEMPTING MEN TO THEIR DEATHS NOW IN CUSTODY

Belle King, aka the Seamstress, has been arrested in the wicked little cow town of Dodge City, Kansas, where she now stands awaiting trial.

“There was quite a shoot-out,” said Sheriff Wyland Hicks, the man responsible for the notorious outlaw’s capture, in an exclusive interview with our esteemed paper by telegram. Hicks is Dodge City’s newest man to wear the star, stepping into the shoes of other famed lawmen from the area such as legends Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Charlie Bassett.

“Luckily, I’m a trained gunman. I used my skills to subdue the suspect and bring her into custody, all while protecting hundreds of innocent bystanders,” Hicks said.

Lucky indeed. Since the discovery of her first alleged victim two months ago, Ms. King has become one of the most talked about women in the world. Once known as a rising star in theater, having performed on illustrious stages from the Teatro La Fenice in Venice to the Palais Garnier in Paris, lawmen suspect that Ms. King has recently developed a more ghastly hobby.

Suspicion of King began when wealthy investor Viktor Crane, a longtime King admirer, was last seen in attendance at King’s show in Deadwood the night before his disappearance. He purportedly paid a hefty sum to see the young singer alone after her performance, swearing to his dinner companions that he would “bed her or die trying.”

Crane’s body was later found in an abandoned mining shaft. The police were horrified to see that thick black twine had been used to suture shut a large wound in the chest. Upon opening the cavity, an autopsy confirmed that the man’s heart was missing—replaced by a rare diamond reportedly taken from his wife’s wedding ring. The professional skill used to sew closed Crane’s body and secure the diamond birthed King her grisly nickname—the Seamstress.

Since then, three other men and their diamonds, all admirers of King and all gentlemen of some renown, have gone missing. And more damning still, King has alluded to the murders in her performances, singing a traditional Appalachian ballad about a man who murdered his lover, “Down in the Willow Garden,” and changing the lover’s name to that of one of the missing men.

While originally King’s many fans insisted the song’s alteration was simply tongue-in-cheek, public sentiment is beginning to shift. Mrs. Abigail Fairchild, wife of the missing Frederick Fairchild, a suspected Seamstress victim and owner of the Queen’s Ransom, the world’s largest diamond, is offering a very enticing reward for the discovery of her husband’s whereabouts and the return of the jewel—half the worth of the Queen’s Ransom, currently valued at $5 million.

The Fairchild family’s money and considerable influence have been used in recent weeks to ensure that King is treated seriously as a dangerous suspect and wanted criminal, even funding a national manhunt. Or, in this case, a girlhunt.

“We don’t know how many she’s killed, exactly,” Hicks admitted. “But it must be a lot, because the United States government is sending one of their federal marshals down to Dodge to assist with her conviction. Folks were looking all over the country for Belle before I caught her.”

Since King’s capture, hundreds of fortune seekers have flocked to Dodge City to attend her trial.

“To be honest it’s a bit of a treasure hunt,” said Lyman Vance, a former miner who traveled to Dodge from Colorado. “I’ve panned for gold most of my life, but I ain’t never found a diamond!”

Others are here entirely for the spectacle. “Brought my whole family from Abilene as soon as we heard,” Jeremiah Tower, a farmer, said. “We expect there to be a real good hanging. Thought it would be a useful morality lesson for the kiddies and a break for me and my wife. Fun for the whole family.”

Stranger still are the men arriving in Dodge who call themselves her admirers, a kind of fan club for the Seamstress. These men distinguish themselves by wearing red handkerchiefs in their pockets to denote that King has stolen their hearts too.

“She’s one of a kind,” Eustace Carter, 51, said of King. “In this whole world there isn’t another woman like her. Pretty as a rose and dangerous as a cobra. I’d marry her tomorrow if she’d have me. Let her kill me too. I’d give anything just to touch her. A woman like that, it’d be like touching the sun.”

Despite the overwhelming interest in King’s fate, trial judge the Honorable Horace Whitstone is begging people to stay home: “I already have enough criminals to worry about.”

But in a town already known for its lawlessness, hotels are filling up and saloons are keeping their doors open day and night to serve the swelling crowds.

Though not everyone believes King is guilty. Father Miguel Santiago, a Catholic priest, has another explanation. “I believe that poor woman’s possessed.”

When asked why he intends to travel to the frontier town from his Kansas City diocese, Father Santiago said he is acting as a representative for the Vatican and that he has only one goal. “I intend to save her soul.”

2

Tigers for Breakfast

Two Years Prior

Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory

“Wake up.”

Stretching, I leave my eyes closed just a moment longer. I’ve always loved those seconds before waking. The possibility of what the day holds. A fly buzzes past my ear, then lands above my lip, tickling me with its legs. I blow it away and make a wish. A part of me still believes that if you just want something hard enough, pray hard enough, in these few seconds, you can create it.

“Wake up.”

Cal.

His voice brings a sleepy smile to my face, and I almost reach to pull him back down onto this little patch of Texas earth. It’s June, and we’re in Cheyenne, named for the Native American tribe that first lived here. The current town, now a city, started as a campsite for the army, then grew into a terminal stop for the Union Pacific Railroad. Settlers and prospectors grew the place so fast, it became known as the Magic City of the Plains. And it must be magic, because here, if the barroom tales can be believed, women even have the right to vote.

But we’re not here for the history. We’re here for the hanging.

And we, the Carnival of the Damned, are here to put on a show. Dom is our barker, Ama reads fortunes, Cash throws knives, and the two skinny Russian brothers toss each other into the air like pulled pretzel dough. Since we started, we’ve also picked up half a dozen others on the road, including a group of professional, if slightly insane, dancers and a fire-breathing man. Cal has his birds. I sing and dance.

The prospect of death puts people in a festive mood. They eat our food and drink our drinks and watch our entertainment. In return, we take their money, some of it without them knowing.

But really, we’re not there for them. We’re there for the man being hanged.

We are a reminder that, guilty or innocent, they are not alone. That we, the Damned, see them and pay witness. We remember that no matter what terrible thing they’ve done, they are human, just like us. And that once upon a time someone, somewhere, loved them.

Tonight, they’re hanging a boy who killed his best friend over a woman they both loved. Then the woman killed herself, so now no one can have her.

If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that love brings sadness. They are two sides of the same coin.

We’ve set our tents up so that there’s a view from the jail cell. If there’s no window to see out of, we make sure the prisoner can at least hear us. Our singing. Our music. Our celebration of life, full of souls on the same side of the law as the sinner. On this, their last night on earth, we keep the condemned company.

Just like we did that very first time.

And thinking of this, remembering on this heavy summer morning just exactly what I’ve already cost Cal, I do reach for him.

But instead of flesh and leather, my fingers sink into something downy soft, and I feel a hot gust of air on my face.

My eyes spring open.

Staring back at me, gold eyes blazing, is a tiger.

An actual, honest-to-goodness, flesh-and-bone tiger, like something out of a child’s storybook.

“What the hell?” I scramble back out of our nest of saddle blankets, nearly falling over. Cal is ear to ear with a dopey grin, the space in his teeth wide enough to jam a pencil through.

“Happy birthday!” He hooks a finger into a loop of his dungarees and winks.

Trying to regain some dignity, I stand up from the earth, brushing the dirt from my nightgown. The sun is crawling its spider legs up the sky, and the prairie grass where we’re camped is ablaze with dew.

In the distance, I can hear the good-natured shouts and banter of the rest of the group, already preparing for our show tonight. The head of a white tent begins to expand into the blue of the skyline like bread dough rising from a campfire pan.

“What do you think?” Cal cocks one eyebrow, looking from me to the tiger.

I rest my hands on my hips and glare. “It’s not my birthday.”

“It’s not?” His nose crinkles up so that the smattering of freckles bunch together in a single smudge. I want to lick my thumb and rub it across the bridge.

“You know it’s not.” Then my eyes return to the tiger, and I forget about Cal completely. She’s wearing a large metal collar about her neck that’s attached to a chain and wrapped around the nearest oak tree. The animal is watching me, just as I’m watching her.

It is a she, I’m certain of it. And she’s beautiful.

“Where did you get her?” I whisper. All that power, locked up by a single chain, and everything in my body aches to rip it off and set her free.

“Traded for her.” Cal’s voice is proud. “There was a man at the gambling hall last night who lost his shirt and the deed to his homestead to me. He was a family man, though. Had agreed to transport this beauty from New York to a circus out in California in exchange for them paying him and his new bride’s way. They were gonna start a new life out there.”

“Until you took his homestead,” I say dryly.

“Naw.” Cal waves my words away. “I told him he could keep that. On the condition that we get the tiger. And he quits gambling. For good.”

I roll my eyes. That sounded like Cal. Just like his father. Always picking up strays, trying to patch them up and put them back in the world better than he found them. “And how are you going to make sure he does that?”

Cal grins. “I said that if he ever gambled again and I found out, he’d wake up one morning roped and smeared with duck fat, with his property kindly returned to him in his wife’s place in bed.”

I laugh. So wicked, my Cal, but all for a good cause.

The sun rises higher overhead, and I can feel the heat coming on, ready to bake itself into the land for another day. The tiger must feel it too. She gives a loud yawn, revealing a row of sharp, glistening white teeth, and then slumps to the ground, flopping over on her back and rubbing all four hundred pounds of herself against the dirt before turning over to sit.

Cal’s voice grows serious. “You can pet her if you want. She’s tame.”

“Wild things aren’t ever tame.” But I step tentatively toward her and, slow as the wind on a breezeless day, stretch out my hand.

She tilts her head just slightly, giving me permission to touch her.

And, taking a deep breath, I do.

Her fur is the softest thing I’ve ever felt. My fingers sink into it up to their knuckles, the glorious orange parting to reveal tufts of black and white. I work my hand through it, aware that if she chose to turn on me, not even Cal and his gun would be fast enough to stop her.

A cloud of dust puffs up from the fur, and I swear it smells of cinnamon. I move to the space behind her ear and begin to scratch, and just the way the barn cats did back home, her eyes squint with pleasure. She lets out a sound somewhere between a growl and a snort.

“That’s called chuffing,” Cal says. “It’s what they do when they’re happy. Tigers, they don’t purr.”

She does it again, air puffing from her nose and rolling out in a tiny, vibrating thunder. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever heard. “You’re magnificent,” I breathe.

I hear Cal move to stand behind me. He lays a hand on my shoulder.

“What’s her name?” I ask without turning around.

“Omisha. Fellow who gave her to me said it means ‘spirit of death,’ but I don’t know if that’s right.”

“We can’t keep her. She deserves to be free.”

“If we let her go, she’ll die out there,” Cal says, ever practical. “Someone will shoot her for her hide or catch her to sell to somebody else.”

“But what will we do with her?”

“What do you want to do?”

And as soon as he asks me, I know.

I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but I do know. Because when I touch her, when I look at her, it feels like touching a part of myself. That inside part that all the men in all the towns have tried to reach but never could.

“I want to dance with her,” I say. “Onstage. In front of everybody. Just one night.”

At that moment the sunlight winks brighter as if in warning, the way it sometimes does out here, like God’s breath blowing on a candle. Then it breaks, dripping down and coating us in sticky egg-yolk yellow.

Would I have stopped then, if I had known?

Would I have told Cal to take the tiger back and just let us go on with our lives? Told him that this was enough? We were enough?

Or would I, even still, have needed to dance with that tiger?

I don’t know.

But I do know one thing—I know what happiness smells like.

It smells like a tiger.

3

A Dead Man

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

“Wake up.”

Sunlight. Tigers.

Cal…

“Tell me where the diamond is.”

My eyes begrudgingly open to the sheriff’s looming figure. He’s sweating. It’s repulsive. He leans over me in my jail cell and presses his face so close that I can see the place he missed shaving this morning. A small patch of hair that sprouts like weeds poking up from somebody’s ugly garden.

I make him wait. His lower lip trembles in anticipation, and we are close enough that I could bite it off.

I imagine the spurt of blood, the way it would coat my teeth and fill my mouth with its hot iron taste.

He must see something in my eyes, because he pulls back. It’s only a few inches, but I can smell his fear.

It’s delicious.

I sit up and try, as best as I can, to make myself comfortable. There is nothing more fearsome to a man than a comfortable woman.

It’s a hard task, though. They’ve placed me in the basement’s single cell, moving the other criminals upstairs so that I am by myself. Surprisingly, there were only a few drunks sleeping off last night’s revelries, though how they chose which ones to lock up and which to leave in the streets is beyond me. It must be a little like scooping a net at the bottom of a pond and proclaiming that the filth you caught is exactly the filth that you were looking for.

I try to cross my legs and remember that I can’t. The sheriff—a man whose name, I’ve discovered, is Hicks, and who is around thirty and descended from an opossum, with brown teeth and a sad mustache that looks like something died on his face—put the shackles on my ankles himself. He has already told me that the blacksmith is making a special new pair for me. Ones that must be welded on. He is quite enjoying having such a valuable possession all to himself to play with.

Hicks shifts his weight, crouching lower in front of me so that we are eye to eye. Equal—not that a man like him could ever be equal to me, but they do so like to try. And then he says, ever so softly, “I want to help you, Belle.”

He does not want to help me. He wants to use me.

“Where’s the diamond?”

This is the same question he asked last night. Screamed it over and over until his voice grew raw with rage.

Now, however, he has decided to change tactics. As if, perhaps, I might forget last night’s temper and be convinced we are friends.

He smiles in what he must think is a winning manner, sending the dead animal on his face twitching. “The thing is, Belle, people are starting to talk. They know you’re here, and they know about the diamond. There are folks out there who’d do anything to get it. More coming each hour.”

Hicks spits a great stream of tobacco into the corner of my cell. I mark the spot.

This man couldn’t keep me safe any more than he could hurt me. But he will try. He will wait until it is dark, and then, like last night, he will come creeping with his opossum paws and their uncut, filthy nails trying to claw the truth out of me. His injuries will be small ones, hidden beneath my dress, where others won’t be able to see. He is not a smart man, but so often men who lack intelligence are the most dangerous kind.

They don’t know enough to realize they can’t ever get what they want.

Certainly not from me.

I nod as if I’m grateful for his protection, then lean in to whisper sweetly in his ear. “Go fuck yourself.”

He pulls back, stricken. A small, angry smile spreads across his face, and his rodent-like eyes go black. “Well, we can talk about that later. Right now, I’m taking you to see the judge. He’s got a lawyer he wants to assign you, seeing as how you’ve refused to hire one yourself.”

I do not want a lawyer.

A lawyer means someone who wants to speak on my behalf, and lawyers are notoriously long-winded.

And I don’t have time to wait.

There really is only one solution. And I can’t say that I won’t enjoy it.

“I’m sorry,” I say, making my voice as honeyed as the inside of a bee’s comb. “I’m just afraid. But I want to tell you.”

The sheriff cocks his head skeptically. I should not have cursed at him. “Tell me what?”

I lower my voice so that he can’t quite hear me. “Where…the diamond.”

“What was that?” He’s still angry, but now he’s interested.

“I want to tell you…the diamond.”

Greed spills across his face. He leans back in, squatting so close I can see the wheel-spoke pattern of his brown eyes. “That’s good, Belle. That’s real good. Tell me.”

I nod, the hair falling in front of my face. He tries to squint through it. Pays no attention to my hand, moving down to my ankle. The way he is positioned, if he startles, he will trip over my newly extended foot.

I can feel the excitement building in my veins.

Now.

I spring forward, and just as I knew he would, the sheriff goes tumbling backward.

There is fear in his eyes, and within less than a second I’ve straddled him and got the chain pressed against his neck.

If I kill someone here, in jail, there can be no mistaking it’s me who’s done it. There won’t need to be a trial. Not a real one, anyway. Not if it’s the sheriff I’ve killed. They’ll hang me and be done with it.

I wind the chain through the metal leg of the cot. Slowly, I start to pull it tighter so that he is pinned to the floor. It isn’t necessary to be bigger than someone you want to kill. One must simply follow a well-rehearsed plan.

I made mine last night. As he tried to pinch the truth out of me, I experimented with just how far my chain would stretch.

The sheriff’s face begins to purple and his eyes bulge in their sockets. Truly, this is not the way I like to do these things, but then, a lady in jail has only so many options.

I let up on the chain just enough so that Hicks can claw it away from his neck. Frantic and gasping, he rolls over and tries to crawl away.

I yank my leg and the chain goes tight again. His face slams down onto the hard floor, into the exact spot where he spit. His lips are sunk into the snail’s trail of tobacco, and I watch him kiss it as he tries to draw breath.

A few more seconds now, and all this will be finished.

But just as his body goes limp, there is a loud rattling noise followed by the sound of a gunshot and a man’s voice. “Stop!”

A grayed man with a grandfather’s wrinkled face shoves open the cell door with wild eyes and a fistful of keys.

A gentleman wearing all black stands beside him, a smoking gun pointed directly at me.

But it’s not the gun that scares me; it’s the man in black’s face.

It’s the face of a dead man.

“Hello, Belle.”

Standing there, five hundred miles away and two years from where I killed him, is my husband.

4

Jarred Hearts

Four Years Prior

Appalachian Mountains

My mother taught me many things.

How to thread a needle by wrapping the string around my forefinger and then rubbing the steel against it like a cat looking to be stroked.

How to plant crops that grow above the ground by the waxing moon and ones that grow below when it is waning.

How to pluck the bottom off a honeysuckle flower and suck its nectar.

And when I was fifteen, she taught me how to jar a dead man’s heart.

I know what you want me to say next. You want me to tell you that it was an accident. That I, as a child, had nothing to do with death. You want to read about my wickedness, but you want it rooted in innocence. A story from my past that grants me sympathy so that you can believe my future is worth saving.

But those are rules meant for bedtime stories and Bibles. The truth is, humans are as much animals as the creatures in the forest.

And a wolf is worth as much as a lamb, even if it isn’t as easy to pet.

My mother was a seamstress. She learned her trade from her mother, who learned from hers in the old country, where, it was said, my great-grandmother sewed for the queen.

There were no queens to sew for in the hills of Kentucky, only coal miners and their wives. Yet you would have thought their tattered old gowns were priceless, the way they harped at Mama, warning her to be careful with their Sunday best.

Those very same women would come crawling up in the moonlight to our house, bellies full, pretending to drop off their clothes for mending but staying long enough for my mother to pull the mountain herbs from the ceiling, where she’d hang them to dry. She’d mix them with a tincture from our pantry, just the way her mother had done and her mother’s mother before, and tell the women to drink it each day for a week.

And when my mother went back down the mountain to drop off the ladies’ clothes, their bellies would be empty again, and they would not meet her eyes. If anything, they were crueler to her for knowing their secrets, haggling with her over mending prices that were already too low to let us buy meat for dinner.

So we grew our own crops, kept our own company, and most days it was more than enough.

During the summer months, I ran wild in the hills and learned to make friends with my shadow. In some ways she was a better playmate than a real girl. She could run as fast as me and was as free as me and was loyal enough to rush fearlessly forward into places I was afraid to go.

Sometimes she even seemed more alive than me.

“Alice.” My mother nudges me with a tender hand toward the stove. “Add some more wood, please. We need to keep that water at a good, strong boil.”

It is August, and the air itself is simmering, the kind of heat that doesn’t rise often this high in the mountains. Outside, the birds have gone quiet, and the fish in the stream bury themselves in mud to keep cool. Inside, our tiny one-room cabin is stifling. Mama and I stand barefoot, wearing nothing but our underwear, and our skin glistens with sweat. We sing to make the work sweeter. Near the end of my mother’s favorite song, a lullaby that her mother used to sing, she goes silent and lets me finish the final chorus alone.

Go to sleep now,

go to sleep now,

birdini, birdini

Go to sleep now,

go to sleep now,

birdini, birdini…

“Beautiful,” she says when I’ve finished, her eyes shining. “Your voice is clear as a bell. Just like your grandmother’s.”

I smile, pleased to have pleased her, though it’s the same thing she always says when I sing.

We’ve brought in the last of the tomatoes from the garden, and now they lie lined up on the large wooden table in the center of the room.

A tomato will rot if you leave its tender skin out for too long, but if you boil it and keep it in a jar, it is a tiny bright spot for the darkest winter day. You can stew it with collard greens and black-eyed peas and make a cousin of Hoppin’ John, or you can add cream to make a velvet soup the color of blood.

“You’re such a good girl, Alice,” my mother tells me, pulling me to her in a sticky hug. “I don’t know what I would do without you.” I ignore my shadow on the wall, dancing and beckoning for me to forget my chores and run wild with her in the fields, knowing now at fifteen she was never real at all. I hug my mother tighter and return to our work.

When the knock comes, the flies are thick around us, buzzing through the steam from the boiling pot. Mama and I are red with pulp, over half the tomatoes scorched and peeled and stuffed into jars.

Mama frowns.

People mostly avoid traveling up here, so far away from the town. There are actual wolves in these mountains, and moonshiners too. The wolves are hungry, and sometimes the moonshiners feed their competitors to the beasts, which only fattens the creatures’ desire for human flesh.

Though I suspect the wolves’ days are numbered.

Wild things these days are being hunted to extinction.

The knock sounds again. “See who it is,” Mama says, licking the sweat from her lips impatiently.

When I open the door, I find the preacher’s daughter standing there. She is hardly older than me. She holds something in her arms, wrapped up tightly in a blanket, and there is blood streaked across her face.

In the distance behind her comes the sound of a man’s furious yell.

“It didn’t work,” she says, her wide eyes frightened. “Papa found the medicine before I could finish it.” She stares straight through me in a way that gives me chills. “He says he’s going to kill me.”

And from the blanket in her arms again comes a soft mewling noise.

Mother brushes me aside, a note of fear in her voice as she stares past me and pulls the girl inside. “Alice, take the girl. You two crawl through the back window and hide in the woods.” The man’s angry shout comes again, followed by a wolf’s low howl.

“He’s going to kill me,” the preacher’s daughter whispers again.

I peer down into the blanket. When I see what’s inside, I slap a hand to my mouth. Other than the hair, it cannot be called human at all.

“Go!” Mama shouts, closing the door.

But it is too late.

The preacher bursts inside before she can lock it. His hair is sweaty, and his suit is rumpled and torn. In his hand is a well-oiled gun.

“You goddamn witch.” His voice comes out a drunken slur. He wears no religious collar, but I know him by his hair. The thinning locks are the same unhealthy spun-sugar blond as his daughter’s.

The same as the newborn baby’s.

“The law’s right behind me, but I’m gonna kill you first. You’ve ruined my daughter, giving her your devil’s brew. You’ve damned her soul!” He steps forward, advancing toward the table.

Behind me, the girl whimpers, her sound echoed by the horror in her arms. Her father grabs her and shoves her behind him and toward the door. “Get outside,” he says. “Wait for me there.”

The girl goes, leaving the door to our cabin swinging open behind her. Outside, the first crickets have begun to sing.

Mama faces the man. “It’s you who’ve ruined her,” she says softly. And in that instant, in her slip, with her long hair falling around her face, she looks like one of the virgins that peer down on this man from stained glass windows on Sundays.

But instead of forgiveness, her face holds rage.

The preacher raises his gun.

And I do the only thing I can think to do. I step between them and begin to sing. Though my heart is fluttering, my voice is steady.

Clear as a bell.

Hush, hush,

little birds,

little birds

Hush, hush,

little birds,

little birds

The preacher stops, as if seeing me for the first time. “Child.” His forehead crumples in confusion. “What are you doing here?”

He sets the gun on the table within arm’s reach and moves to push me aside.

“Don’t you touch her!” my mother screams, rushing at him. Her eyes are wild. The preacher stumbles backward, surprised.

But he quickly regains his composure. He’s twice her size, and catching her, he throws Mama’s tiny body onto the ground. I watch in horror as he leans down to wrap his hands around her neck and begins to squeeze.

On the floor, Mama’s face grows red, then purple, and finally her eyes flutter closed.

I want to move, but I can’t. It’s as if the whole world has stopped.

Through the open door, the setting sun flares a final, brilliant time and suddenly my shadow appears on the wall. She is so tall she reaches the ceiling. Spreading over me, then over the preacher’s gun, she does what I cannot.

There is a flash of light.

The preacher rocks backward on his heels. A hole wide enough to see the sky through blooms magically in his chest.

And then he falls down dead to the floor.

Mother crawls, gasping, from under his body, sprays of his blood across her skin.

She rips the gun from my hands. “Alice, what have you done?” She stares at me, and I cannot tell the man’s blood on her apron from the tomatoes’ juices.

“It wasn’t me,” I say, or try to say. “It wasn’t me, Mama.”

“It’s all right.” My mother bends over the man as if she might try to save him. Instead, she begins to dig inside the dead man’s chest. “We have to get rid of him. The wolves will clean his bones,” she says bluntly, “but they won’t eat a bullet.” She continues to dig in the flesh, her hands growing bloody, and when she pulls them out, she has the heart. There is too much buckshot to pick it clean.

“Hand me the tomatoes.” My mother’s voice is calm, but her hand trembles as she motions to the jars. I take one up and give it to her. Unscrewing the lid, she shoves the bloody heart inside with the rest of the soft red pulp. Mama goes to the stove and plunges the jar back into the boiling water, sealing it closed. She pulls it out again and sets it, still dripping, onto the counter, where it is indistinguishable beside the others.

Her smile is shaky, but her yellow eyes are full of love. She takes the preacher’s gun and goes to stand over his body. “Let’s bring him outside,” she tells me. “Come, Alice. Help me lift him. It will be all—”

“Papa?” The preacher’s daughter reappears in the door.

And she is not alone. Behind her is the figure of a man in a police uniform.

He looks at my mother, at the dead man on the floor, and at the gun still in her hand.

And then he raises his own gun and fires.

5

How to Save a Life

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

For a ghost, he looks very much alive.

His eyes are tired, and his hair is longer, but the three long pink scars on his left cheek leave no doubt as to who he is. My husband.

My skin prickles with heat. The basement jail is nearly windowless, and its thick limestone walls trap any breeze. The locals call this place the limekiln because in the summer’s baking sun it is as hot as an oven. The dress they gave me is ringed with perspiration, but the man standing in front of me looks as cool as if he’s just crawled from the grave.

“Ha, you bitch!” The sheriff backs quickly from me, triumph in his eyes. “This here is Reginald Salinger. A real-life federal marshal.” Hicks cackles, then winces, raising a hand to his throat. “He’s gonna make you tell me where the Queen’s Ransom is, and then you’re goddamn well going to hang!”

My husband slowly lowers his gun.

My heart stops beating in my chest, and I clutch a wad of fabric from my dress in my fists, working the sweat-soaked cloth in my hands so that he won’t see them trembling.

This won’t do. How? Why?

“I thought I killed you.” My voice catches, unsure how to proceed.

“But here I am.” He gives me a smile, leaning his cocksure frame against the jail cell and running a hand through hair so black it looks painted on. He is dressed just as I remember Reginald always dressing. It’s impossible, but his newly cleaned leather boots are the same pair that once pinned my neck to the ground, and the knife at his belt is the one he slipped into the fire on cold nights and pressed against my skin. When he sees me staring, he reaches his hand to touch the blade and winks.

My mind fills with one thought and one thought only. I cannot let this man touch me again.

As if he knows what I’m thinking, my husband turns to Hicks. “Sheriff, how about you give the prisoner and me a little privacy.”

“Are you crazy?” Hicks moves shakily in his lifted boots, skirting as far away from me as he can to exit the cell. A red ring is forming around his neck from where I wrapped the chain. “That woman just said she wanted to kill you.”

“No, she said she did kill me. Clearly, she’s insane. I imagine she says a lot of things that aren’t true.”

The sheriff nods in agreement. Refusing to come closer, he motions for the jailer—the older man with the keys—to lock it closed again. “Goddamn viper.”

“Hiss.” I lunge toward him. It is only a feint, and I am rewarded by the jailer—who is surprisingly strong—grabbing my arm through the bars and yanking me so roughly that I will have a bruise beneath my dress come morning.

“That’s enough!” My husband moves threateningly toward the jailer, and his formal black coat swings open. Underneath I see an ivory-handled gun on the hip opposite his knife. “No one lays a hand on this woman but me.”

“Don’t guess that’s for you to say.” Sheriff Hicks puffs out his chest, clearly annoyed at being given direction. “That there woman is my prisoner, fair and square. I caught the witch myself.”

Their quibbling allows me time to think. What they mustn’t see, what he musn’t see, is how shaken I am.

Because when I left Reginald, I made myself a promise.

I also left fear.

I will not go back now. The jailer lets go of my arm, and I retreat farther into my cell.

My husband shakes his head in disgust at the sheriff. “Did you or did you not receive the letter the government sent you recommending me for this job?”

Hicks flinches at the reprimand. “I received somethin’. Said you were one of the best agents they had at solving cases like this one.”

“Not one of the best.” My husband stands straighter, and I note his assured attitude that makes men and women alike so easily trust him. “The best. I’ve forced the confessions of more outlaws than any federal marshal or local lawman out there.” He turns on the sheriff. “Or don’t you believe me?”

“No, sir.” The sheriff is properly cowed now. He reaches up to nervously twist his hideous mustache. “I mean…yes, sir. Course I do. You came highly recommended in the senator’s letter. Official seal and everything.”

“So you’re not questioning my ability?”

The sheriff twists his mustache so hard I’m shocked it doesn’t fall off. “No, sir.”

“Then leave. If it’s the diamond you’re worried about”—a flash of lust lights in Hicks’s eyes at the word, and I know that is exactly what he’s worried about—“and its reward, I assure you, I’m your best chance of finding it.”

Still, the sheriff hesitates. I can practically see the gears turning in the poor man’s mind, weighing the risk of me confessing to someone else when he’s not here. “It’s just…I wouldn’t go within ten feet of her, Mr. Salinger. Not alone. It’s like you said. That bitch is crazy. And if you were to get hurt, it wouldn’t look too good for me.”

“Perhaps this will help ease your mind.” My husband reaches into his pocket and pulls out a five-dollar gold coin. “For your trouble. The government’s given me a small allowance to help with my travel and expenses, and I’d be happy to share it with you.”

The sheriff’s eyes light up as he pockets it. “I suspect it will.” He turns to the jailer. “Brownie, let Agent Salinger into that she-devil’s cell and lock it behind you. I’ll head back upstairs for, oh, say, fifteen minutes. That give you enough time?”

My husband nods.

Hicks leers knowingly. “I thought so. I’ll leave Brownie at the top of the stairs for your protection. Just holler if you need anything.” He winks. “You take real good care of her, now.”

“I promise you. There is no one who is more interested in this woman’s well-being than myself. You let me do things my way, and she’ll get what she deserves.”

Hicks does not need a second invitation. He waits for the jailer to unlock the door and let my husband inside before locking it closed again. They both depart. I hear their boots clomping up the basement stairs as they ascend, leaving us, finally, alone.

Only a single square of light leaks in from the small, barred basement window overhead. A shape flutters past it, blocking the sun.

“What are you doing here?” I press myself against the wall so that he cannot reach me.

“Isn’t that obvious?” He takes a step forward. “I came for you. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

“I wouldn’t call it easy.”

He gives a harsh, barking laugh. “Nothing with you ever was. Then again, that was the pleasure of it.”

He’s closer now. Another step. I can feel the heat from him. Smell his sweat.

I can’t let him touch me.

“You changed your hair.” My words are light, but they carry a threat. The reminder that, no matter what gentleman’s face he chooses to present to the world, I know the truth. But still there’s only so much I can say. I imagine Hicks at the top of the stairs, ear cocked.

“A lot of things have changed.” He stares pointedly at the bars surrounding us. He drops his voice lower, quieter. “But I’m still your husband.”

“No!” I despise the desperate sound of my voice. The last thing I want for my legacy is to be known as simply somebody’s wife. “You can’t be Reginald Salinger. Reginald Salinger is dead!”

“They never found a body,” he reminds me. “But then again, you know that. Careless, just tipping me over the cliff like that.”

I am shaking. I hate myself for it, but I can’t stop my body from reacting to his presence.

“Leave.” I try to sound brave. “Right now. I’ve made my decision. Don’t make me hurt you again.”

“What’s the matter, Alice? Aren’t you happy to see me?”

I can feel his breath on my face, and it sends a shiver down my spine.

So close. Too close.

“That’s not my name anymore.”

“I’ll call you whatever you want. But I know who you really are. I always have.”

And then I realize what’s going to happen next. He’s going to touch me. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

I can only imagine how I seem. Filthy, the dress they’ve given me a stinking remnant of the nightgown of some poor whore they locked away for the night, my hair a tangled rat’s nest from the sheriff’s rough handling and the lack of a comb.

But then I look up and into my husband’s eyes. They are locked onto my face like it’s the most precious thing in the world.

He still wants me. After everything. After all I’ve done, he can’t stay away.

Reaching out, he moves a hand toward my face.

And, opening my mouth, I take his finger between my lips.

His skin tastes exactly as I remember. Of dirt and sweat and sweet peeled orange. And I can’t pretend anymore. I am not brave; I am not all-powerful; I am, once again, under his command.

No.

His finger lingers, and I sink my teeth down hard.

Blood, sweet and true, flows into my mouth as my teeth go all the way to the bone.

“Alice!” He tries to pull his hand away, but it only serves to drive my bite deeper.

Hearing the commotion, Brownie comes flying down the stairs to the cell, as shockingly quick as he was strong. Flustered, he tucks his gun by his side as he struggles with the lock. “Hang on, Mr. Salinger, sir! I’ll save you!”

But there is no need. Gently, I open my mouth, letting my husband’s finger slip free. “You shouldn’t have come.”

He falls away from me, clutching his hand to his chest.

The jailer enters, too late. The poor man stares at me, and I can feel the blood, slippery around my lips.

“You all right, Mr. Salinger?”

There’s no answer.

“You want me to shoot her?” the jailer asks, eyes wide.

There is the sound of more boots on the stairs.

“What the hell’s going on in here?” Sheriff Hicks finally appears behind the jailer. He does not, I note, step back inside the cell himself. “Brownie,” he yelps at the jailer. “What the hell have you let happen? Help Mr. Salinger get that wrapped!” Then, to my husband, “I warned you!”

But my husband ignores both the help and the reprimand. He stares at me as Brownie moves between us to lock the door.

“You can’t scare me away.”

And despite everything I’ve promised myself, I feel the smallest kindling of fear.

“And you can’t touch me.” I bare my bloody teeth in a grin. “Not in here, and not anymore. If you want to watch my final dance on the hangman’s noose, I’ll buy you a ticket.”

“My sweet girl.” He lets go of his hand, and I watch his finger’s blood drip down onto the earth, in three bloody kisses.

But when I look up, he’s smiling. And when he speaks, it is in a whisper that only I can hear.

“Don’t you know? I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to save your life.”

6

The Lady or the Tiger

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

When they finally leave me alone in my cell, I sink onto the cot and try to regain my composure. The sky outside is dark now, but I can still see the spatter of blood on the floor from my husband’s finger, and I remember the salty taste of his blood.

It makes me smile.

But not for long.

I’m here to save your life.

I won’t let him. All my work will be for naught if I don’t get my conviction. My hanging.

On the wall beside me, my shadow dances in the gleaming moonlight.

I lie down on the thin mattress and, for just a second, close my eyes and let my mind return to a happier place.

To sunlight and the Damned.

I expect Cal to be waiting for me there, in my memories. Instead, I find Dom. Dom in her stiff farmer’s overalls and low straw hat pulled over her easily burned skin. Dom, who had, once upon a time, been kind enough to call me her friend.

And then I hear her. Her voice as real as the winged thing outside my window.

“Let me tell you a story, old gal.”

Old gal. I smile. Her nickname for me. A term of endearment. It is as though she is here in the cell beside me, squatting on the filthy floor beside my cot. “You like stories, don’t you?”

I nod, and even though she is not really there to see me, in my mind she can.

“That’s good, then. I got a new one for ya. Fellow at the last show left his magazine and it had this one in it.”

I let the warmth of her voice wash over me, and now I am no longer in this stifling cell at all. I am outside with a dark black sky over my head, and it’s covered with a thousand stars. There is a blazing campfire, and I can smell the smoke from the mesquite wood. The scratchy ticking of my cot is replaced with the powdery softness of the loamy earth that I pick up to press between my fingers.

I don’t believe in heaven, but this is close.

“I thought of you right away when I read it.” Dom settles in easily beside me, crossing her legs. I catch a glimpse of Cal’s figure in the distance, throwing a child’s red rubber ball somebody left in our carnival tent back and forth with Cash. The two of them look like kids themselves, scampering over the long prairie grass trying to catch it. One of the Russian brothers—hard to say in the dim light which one—turns a cartwheel between them, catching it with his feet.

“Omisha will like it too,” Dom says. “It’s got a tiger in it and everything.”

Somewhere in the distance, the coyotes start up, and it’s as though they’re a part of our pack, adding their voices to our wild chorus.

On the other side of the fire, where she is chained to the wagon, Omisha’s ears perk, and she lets out a long, guttural growl that I feel in my bones.

It’s a strange thing to have such a powerful creature so close. I don’t like to see her chained, but I know that, at least for now, it is necessary. Neither of us really knows if we can trust the other.

Even so, as her eyes light across the fire, the yellow of them catching and holding the flames, I don’t feel frightened; I feel lucky.

“What are you two motherfuckers up to?” Ama floats out of her tent, holding a book a hand’s length away from her face, her thick black hair pulled back in a braid, revealing her sharp cheekbones.

Dom frowns. She hates Ama’s language. But I understand it. Someone that beautiful has to put a distance between herself and the rest of the world. Ama ran away from a school where the nuns tried to make her ride horses sidesaddle so she wouldn’t lose her virginity and replaced all her books with a Bible.

“You shouldn’t be reading in the dark,” Dom chides. “It’s bad for your eyes.”

“I’ll do whatever the hell I want when I want.” But Ama sets the book down, pages open and spine spread on the earth, sinking gracefully beside us onto her knees. “Anyhow, go back to your conversation. Don’t let me stop you.”

“I was just telling Alice here a story,” Dom says gruffly, but her voice perks up like a peacock’s feathers. She knows how much Ama loves stories, and Dom’s an excellent teller of tales. During the day she’s the barker for the Damned, calling folks toward our tents, luring them closer with her enticing descriptions of what’s inside if only they’ll part with their pennies. Her voice is captivating, and two years later, when I find myself sitting beside a man whose life I’ll take, my victim and I listening to the inaugural performance of Saint-Saëns’s Le Carnaval des animaux, I will hear the mellifluous song of the swan, performed by the cello, and think of Dom.

Her voice, like that cello’s, spans time and space and gender. Folks can believe whatever they want of that voice. Trust whatever it tells them. She says she once convinced the kids from her one-room schoolhouse in Nebraska they needed to make their way to town during a blizzard or they’d starve before anyone found them, and even the older boys and teacher followed her through the miles of snow.

“Well, are you gonna tell it or not?” Ama says, and I see Dom flush. There’s something between them, but I don’t know what.

“Stop interrupting me, and I will.” She makes us wait a few seconds longer as punishment. For an instant the world flickers, and I am in the jail cell again, behind the cold, dark walls where the only open sky I will ever see again is the one they hang me beneath. But then Dom begins, and I follow her voice back to the memory. “Once upon a time, there was a cruel and savage king.”

I lean closer, wanting to catch every word. It’s a story I remember well and one I want to hear again.

“Kings is always cruel.” Ama laughs. “What’s so special about this one?”

Dom hushes her with a glare before continuing. “This king, he liked to watch people fight. He was especially obsessed with the gladiators in ancient Rome. As a little boy he had a whole play set of warriors he’d throw into a toy coliseum his father had built for him. Sometimes he’d even use animals, pitting one poor beast against another. A mouse against a squirrel, their tails cinched to make them mad with pain.”

Ama hisses, a great intake of breath. Despite her language, she is incredibly tenderhearted. “Bastard.”

“Yes.” Dom nods, cracking her knuckles in agreement. “And he did not grow kinder with age. When his father died and he became king, he put away his toys and built an actual coliseum, as large and grand as anything in Rome. There was a great stadium above it with enough seats for every man and woman in the land. But instead of warriors, he used prisoners. Any man who was accused of a crime.”

Her voice dropped to its lower notes, building the suspense.

“Except he didn’t make them fight. Instead, he built two doors into that coliseum. And when a prisoner was caught, instead of going to trial or jail, the king threw him inside the coliseum and forced him to open one of those two doors. Behind one of the doors was a beautiful lady, perfectly chosen for the man. If the prisoner picked this door, then he was considered innocent and allowed to marry the woman in a great celebration that all the audience would attend.” She pauses, the firelight flashing ominously across her face. “But if he chose the other…a vicious tiger roared forth, ripping the poor man to shreds.”

“What if it was a woman?” Ama asks. “They didn’t have no gentleman for her? Or did she get to marry the lady too?” Her voice turns teasing, and if I hadn’t been watching Dom so closely, the darkness might have hidden her flush.

“Be quiet. Anyway, one day the king’s daughter was caught with one of his slaves. The slave was handsome and smart but far below the princess in station. The king, furious, threw the man directly into the coliseum and told him he had to choose a door. Behind one of the doors was the man-eating tiger. But behind the other was the most beautiful woman in all the land. So beautiful, she even rivaled the princess. In fact, the princess had seen her lover talking to this woman on occasion. Thought she maybe even saw his eye wander to her in court as well.”

The coyotes’ song grows louder and Omisha rises half-heartedly to her two front paws, peering into the dark, before slumping down again. She’s not worried. Rather, her curiosity is the comfort of a predator contemplating prey.

“The princess,” Dom went on, “was devastated. And she used all her wiles to find out, finally, which door contained the tiger.”

“Slept with ’em all,” Ama says lazily. “Gave the doorkeepers a good fuck.”

Dom does not dignify this with a response, and Ama looks disappointed.

“On the day of the prisoner’s sentence, the stadium is filled with every soul in the land. And when the slave walks out—looking so handsome many a woman wished they’d been chosen to be behind the door—he bows to the king. Except he’s not really bowing to him, see. He’s looking at the princess. She’s been up all night, tormented over what to do. She keeps imagining each possibility. Her lover opening a door and his body—the one she’d loved so dearly—being ripped to shreds by a beast.”

Dom’s eyes glow.

“But sometimes it’s the second possibility that seems worse. Her man opens the door and there is the other woman, as pretty as the princess. Prettier, maybe. And the princess has to watch as the man she loves takes this woman in his arms and makes her his wife in front of the entire kingdom. But finally, after a sleepless night, she’s made her decision. When the slave looks up at her, she looks right back. And ever so slightly, so that no one else can see—their eyes are all on her lover anyway—she points toward a door. And, going slowly forward, her lover opens it.”

Ama and I both lean forward, breathless now. Dom closes her eyes and grows silent. We wait and we wait and we wait until, finally, she speaks.

“The end,” Dom says.

Ama explodes. “That’s it? That’s the whole goddamn story? What was behind the door?”

Dom shrugs, clearly pleased with herself. She’s hooked us and hooked us good. “Well, that’s where the story ends. You have to decide. Did he find the lady or the tiger?”

“Well, I sure as shit hope it’s the tiger!” Ama says.

Dom looks startled. “Are you serious? You’d actually kill someone you loved?”

Ama scoffs. “That ain’t love.”

I leave the two of them arguing and get up to find Cal. He’s done with his game of catch and, with a suggestive smile, grabs my hand and pulls me into his tent, where I tell him the story.

“The lady,” he says when I finish. “Gotta be. The princess loved him, didn’t she? Course she chose the lady, no matter how much it hurt.”

He falls asleep, content with his answer, and when, a few minutes later, I’m still awake, I go back out and sit beside the dying fire and Omisha. Reaching out a hand, I stroke her belly. She lets me, though not without a low growl to remind me just what she could do.

I see the faint glow of a cigarette across the firepit and realize that I’m not alone. Dom steps forward, brushing the ashes from her overalls. “Hello, Alice.”

She offers me the hand-rolled cigarette, and I take it, inhaling the tobacco deep into my lungs. The paper burns down with a crackle as my breath ignites the flames.

“So which do you think it was?” she asks. “The lady, or the tiger? Goddamn story. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

I inhale another long drag before passing the cigarette back to her.

My eyes flip open, and the faint smell of tobacco lingers.

Dom is gone. Once again, I am alone in my cell. I think of the princess. Her cold eyes as she flicks her finger toward the door.

I never answered Dom then, but I answer her now, my words falling into the silence of the dark.

“I think the lady was the tiger.”

7

Judgment

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

The next morning, Sheriff Hicks leads me out of my cell, a pistol at my head and the hunched-over jailer, Brownie, at his back. My husband, I’m relieved to see, is nowhere in sight.

I’m here to save your life.

“If she so much as moves,” the sheriff says to Brownie, and I imagine his mustached upper lip trembling, “shoot her.”

They won’t, of course. This is what the sheriff doesn’t understand. He is like a parent making empty threats to a child to get her to behave.

The sheriff needs me alive. His reputation depends on it. A man who can’t handle a female prisoner—who kills her and robs the people of their hanging—is not a man who will hold his office for long.

“Now, you listen and listen good,” Hicks says. We’re at the stairs, and I can almost hear his poor brain whirring. Stairs are trouble. They leave a man no place to turn around. “Don’t try anything. I’m watching you.”

He’s right to be frightened. I could kill him any number of ways. A simple slip and fall backward, and then he’s taken out Brownie behind him and I’m free to grab either of their guns. Not that I’d need them. Teeth work just as well to tear out a man’s throat, though it’s not a method I prefer. Messy business, that. And unfortunately, in my position, I only have the one gown.

“Go on.” His voice is a pathetic growl, but I let him think he’s got me cowed.

Because the truth is, in this moment I need him alive just as much as he needs me. He’s the man with the keys, after all. He decides who gets in and out of the jail.

I need him to keep me in until I hang.

And I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.

I hear the people in the crowd before I see them.

I’ve read the papers, of course. It’s the one thing they allow me in my cell. Partly because there’s no way I can kill myself or anyone else with newsprint. (So they think, anyway. The law has never had the most creative of minds. I could think of a dozen ways.) But mostly it’s so that Hicks can ensure I’ll read about his glory. The paper is high in its praise of the man who “caught” the nation’s most notorious killer.

What they don’t mention is that I asked to be caught. The sheriff has made sure that particular tidbit was left out.

The voices overhead grow louder, and we emerge from the basement onto the first floor. Dodge City is one of the new frontier towns that makes its buildings do double duty, as there are so few real ones. Most places are just sticks and spit making a stand against the formidable prairie wind. But this particular edifice is proper limestone and three stories tall. Below is the jail, but upstairs is the courthouse, with wood instead of dirt for the floor. The pine has only been recently laid and still shows scratches easily. Each prisoner’s walk from cell to judge leaves its own scuffed trail of misery.

Even through the thick stone walls, the commotion outside is deafening. We pass by a large window and the glass shatters, shards flying through the air.

The sheriff stops with a curse, spinning toward the now-open sky. A man is trying to crawl through.

“I’ll save you, Belle!” I can smell the whiskey from here. The man wobbles to his feet. He manages to grab hold of my skirt and then looks up at me with bloodshot, lovelorn eyes. “Marry me, Belle! You can have my heart.” He begins to pull what looks like a red silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and tries to hand it to me.

Brownie—who, it must be noted, seems the far more capable of the two men accompanying me—uses the butt of his gun to knock the man across the back of his head, and I watch as he slumps, unconscious, to the ground.

“Who was that?” I ask, amused.

“Goddamn fool’s who,” Hicks says. “Press is calling them your admirers. Whole pack of them out there say they want to marry you, the crazy bastards.”

In fact, even as he says this, more men, in equal states of inebriation, all with red handkerchiefs in their pockets, seem to be trying to climb through the window. Brownie shoots over their heads and they fall back. “You go on, Sheriff,” he says. “Miss King.” Shifting a wad of tobacco in his mouth, he nods to me. “I’ll get some boards and nail ’em over the window so those men don’t bother you no more.”

Hicks, clearly not liking to continue without Brownie, considers his odds. I see him judging the distance between here and a large door at the end of the hall that leads, I assume, to the courtroom and that, no doubt, can be locked. “Come on,” he says, shoving me hard in the back. “Get moving.”

I consider giving him what he deserves—the man’s left his keys dangling from his pocket and his neck a hug away from my chains—but I’ve other matters to attend. There will be time for fun later.

“One moment.” I turn to the jailer. “Brownie, I know that you are currently incapacitated, but if you would be so kind, I’d like you to send a telegram for me. Address it to Lucretia Salinger, of Atlanta. Tell her that her brother is here with me, would you? I’m afraid she might not have heard, and I’d hate for her to miss the trial.”

It is a safety measure, nothing more, and yet I feel a small wave of guilt course through me.

“I’ll make sure to do it.” The jailer nods, kicking at the head of another man trying to crawl through.

“Thank you, Brownie.”

“Hurry up.” I can hear the spit stick in Hicks’s throat as he swallows, and sighing, I let him guide me to the courtroom doors.

He shoves them open.

The second I enter, chaos erupts. Hicks nervously leads me to the witness box, where he deposits me with my shackles still on.

“Kill her!”

“Save her! Save my Belle!”

The courtroom is stuffed tighter than a con man’s wallet, and everyone is shouting.

Except for him. There, in the front row, hands crossed neatly in his lap, sits my husband, completely silent. He does not so much as look at me.

The judge pounds his gavel on the podium, letting it punctuate his roar. “SILENCE!”

For a wonder, the room complies. They don’t want to miss what will happen next.

“Miss King.” The judge leans down from his podium, and a white cowboy hat paired with his black judge’s robe reminds me that although I am in a courtroom, frontier justice reigns. When he speaks, he scrunches his drink-red nose like a rabbit. “Do you understand the crimes of which you have been accused?”

“I do, Your Honor.” I nod demurely. I’ve learned it’s best to pretend respect with a man like this; otherwise they will waste a great deal of your time trying to get it.

“Murder in the first degree, desecration of a corpse, and theft.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

He has left off kidnapping and assault, but I am in no position to be greedy.

“I want to be very clear, here.” Scrunch, scrunch goes his fat red nose. “Despite what the papers might claim, you are on trial for one body and one body only, as”—scrunch, scrunch—“despite the rumors and other missing persons, no other body has been found.”

I can’t help myself. “I assure you, sir, I’ve destroyed many a man’s life.”

The judge, to his credit, refuses to take my bait. “Be that as it may”—scrunch, scrunch—“we only have the one body. Therefore, you are on trial for the murder of Viktor Crane and Viktor Crane alone.”

“Is it still a hanging offense?” I ask hopefully.

“It is.” He frowns. “And it is my understanding that you have asked to waive your right to an attorney?”

Shocked murmurs pepper the courtroom, and the judge silences them with a fearsome stare before returning his attention to me. Reporters scribble furiously in their notebooks.

“I have, Your Honor.”

“Miss King, I must tell you how unwise I think that is. A woman in your position is quite incapable of mounting a defense.”

“I don’t intend to mount a defense. I intend to confess.” I stand, facing the crowd. “I killed Viktor Crane.”

The courtroom erupts.

“Order! ORDER!”

Once again the room quiets.

The judge stares at me, as if waiting for me to change my mind. I don’t.

“Well, if that is the case”—scrunch—“I believe we can do away with the jury and move on to the sentencing.”

I smile beatifically at him. “Thank you, Your Honor.”

“Forgive me.” In the front row, my husband stands.

The judge frowns. “Yes?”

“My name is Federal Marshal Reginald Salinger. And I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say first.”

The judge considers, shuffling his papers on the podium in front of him. “That’s right. I received a letter about you. Ah yes. Here it is.” He squints at the paper. “Says here that a fellow named Samuel Wallace is acting on behalf of the nation’s government to present evidence.”

“I’ve replaced him, Your Honor,” my husband says. “As you’ll hear, I believe I’m a better fit for the case.”

The judge sets down the paper. “Well. Get on with it. Why is that?”

“I know this woman.” Small gasps. My husband stands there calmly. He is dressed impeccably. Black suit, black tie, and that goddamn trustworthy smile. And in his hand is a locked briefcase. “Who she really is. In fact, I know her better than anyone.” He pauses, waiting for complete silence before continuing. And when he speaks, it is with the bravado of a showman revealing his greatest trick. “I’m her husband.”

The courtroom explodes with noise.

I stand. “Your Honor, don’t listen to him.” My heart is pounding.

But it is too late. My husband moves toward me. I wait for the judge to stop him, but he doesn’t. My husband crosses the space, taking every eye in the courtroom with him. His smile widens. He speaks loudly enough for the entire courtroom to hear. “And before I married my wife, I arrested her and took her to a madhouse.”

“ORDER! ORDER!”

The spectators reluctantly quiet, people straining to hear what will happen next.

“This girl,” my husband says, “is a known liar.” He shakes his head sadly. “Though it is through no fault of her own. She had a most unfortunate upbringing, and I’m afraid it drove her insane.”

“I had a wonderful upbringing. A wonderful mother.”

My husband leans closer, but his voice stays loud. Clear. I can smell his skin. The scent of oranges. “A mother who, when you were just fifteen, killed a man. And in an effort to save her, you took the blame.”

“No!” I am shaking. Standing tall, I shout into the courtroom, “I killed him! I killed that man!” I have lost control, just as he knew I would when he spoke of my mother. “And I killed Viktor Crane!”

“Your Honor.” My husband approaches the bench. “May I?” The judge nods. My husband places his briefcase on the podium and opens it, removing a sheaf of papers. “These,” he says, spreading them out in front of the judge, “are the papers showing that this girl was committed to the Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum after her mother killed a man and this poor child tried to save her reputation by claiming the crime as her own. Even after treatment she insisted she was a murderer. After she was released from the asylum, she quit taking her medicine, escaped my care, and created this persona…this Belle King…to continue her delusions of power.”

Scrunch. Scrunch. “So you’re saying she didn’t kill Viktor Crane?”

“She did not, Your Honor.”

The judge glowers. “Then who did?”

My husband sweeps his hand across the courtroom to the men with the red handkerchiefs. “Any one of these men. A jealous fan hoping for more. A deranged man trying to erase his competition. Who’s to say what a man in passion might be driven to do for the attention or affection of the girl he loves.”

“No,” I whisper, and I know what is going to happen even before it does.

The first man steps forward. It’s the same admirer who crashed through the window, though I have no idea how he found his way in here. “I did it! I killed Viktor Crane.”

“No. It was me!” Another admirer rushes in front of him. “I killed Viktor Crane!”

And now there are half a dozen of them, each screaming their confession, fighting to be the one to save my life.

“This woman”—my husband points at me—“should not be in a noose or even in a jail cell. She should be where she belongs. Back in an asylum.”

And, furious, I listen as my husband deals the final death knell to my confession. “Her name isn’t even Belle King; it’s Alice Springer.” His eyes glow. “And she’s never killed a man in her life.”

8

Madwomen

Four Years Prior

Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum

A madwoman is not allowed to be sane.

They gag our mouths, drug us with chloroform, and wrap our disobedient limbs in straitjackets.

Yet still we fight.

The doctors have many names for our rebellion.

Moral insanity.

Extreme jealousy.

Period-related madness.

Hysteria.

Unlike even the worst prisons, in the asylum books are banned, as is meat, and when starving our bodies and minds does not do enough to quench our thirst for autonomy, they try to rid us of our womanhood.

They search for it in the only place they know to look.

A thirty-year-old wife who says she hates her husband’s touch has leeches attached to her genitals to suck away their venom.

A girl no older than me is injected with ice water between her legs so that she might not spread them so freely.

A banker’s daughter who refuses to stop living with her female friend is held down, sedated, and given a clitoridectomy to cure her madness.

And a twelve-year-old boy born into a girl’s body is made to dress in women’s clothes and shocked each time he looks in a mirror and cries.

These poor souls mix with all the other women society prefers to keep locked away, including the old, the indigent, the aberrant, and those who have gotten themselves on the wrong side of the law.

Including me.

The police have branded my mother a murderer to justify her death, and when, furious, I tried to confess the crime as my own, they called me insane and locked me in here.

The Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum had expanded a little over a decade ago, taking over an existing home for feeble-minded children and shuttling some of its patients here. Many of the girls remain still, women now.

In their faces, I see what I will become.

Or, rather, unbecome.

For those who started here as little girls are no longer human.

They have become empty dolls whose faces show no emotion.

Who cast no shadows.

“I’m trying to help you, Alice. All you have to do is say it was your mother who killed that man.” A week after they bring me here, the officer who shot my mother comes to speak with me. In the light of day I see how young he is. No more than twenty, with shiny black hair like a thoroughbred stallion and cold gray eyes. Perhaps a little shorter than what is considered strictly desirable, but he carries himself as if he is taller. His broad chest and strong arms only help further the illusion of size. He has the figure of someone who has worked at being strong—his muscles are too finely crafted to come from actual labor. The way he moves, the way he talks, is not like any policeman I’ve met before. And his fine manners give him away as someone who once knew money.

“I killed that preacher,” I say, clenching my jagged nails so hard into my palms that they bleed. “You killed an innocent woman.”

The superintendent of the asylum has set aside a room for our interview. A small, closet-sized space next to his office, with bare walls and a scuffed floor that smells of bleach. But it has a window. And outside is the clean blue sky.

I ache for it.

“Please.” The young officer pulls out a chair. “Sit.”

I have never had a man treat me like this. Nor have I seen one treat any woman in this way. It is like something out of a book. One of the dime novels about ladies that Mama liked to read on lonely winter evenings.

Mama.

Her face flashes before me. The red of it as this man’s bullet erased the only person I have ever loved.

“My name is Reginald Salinger,” the officer says, taking a seat. His gray eyes remind me of something reptilian. There is no warmth in them, but there is beauty. And clarity. It is as if he can peer into my very soul. And his voice, when he speaks, holds a mesmerizing charm. “I am so very sorry that you have lost your mother.”

His words choke me. Because despite everything, despite watching him pull the trigger, they are the first kindness anyone has offered me here.

“I know she wouldn’t want to see you like this, Alice.” His mouth holds my name carefully, like a snake’s fangs cupped tenderly around a delicate egg it means to eat. And when he reaches across the table to lay his hand over mine, I don’t pull away.

“You’re all alone now,” Reginald says. “It’s not a good place to be in this world for a woman.”

I don’t answer. I am thinking of trees and forests and the smell of my mother when I press myself into her apron and she buries me in it for a hug.

“What happened to your mother was a tragic accident,” Reginald goes on. “But what you are doing to her is worse.”

I yank my hand away, and my eyes spring open.

There in the corner of the room, for the first time since I arrived, I see my shadow. She is tall in the late-afternoon light—no longer the child who sprinted with me through the Kentucky hills but a grown woman.

And she is speaking, begging me to run.

He’s a liar! she whispers. Run! Bite his throat and leave him dead. Run fast and far away!

“Alice.” Reginald’s gaze meets mine. “I want you to know that I’m sorry.”

“What?” I lose sight of my shadow.

“Yes.” He nods his head gravely, and again I am reminded of his beauty. So strange, like a horse and a snake gave birth to some new creature. “Sorry for what you made me do.”

“What I made you do?” For an instant, my fury reignites, the flame of anger that raged at the injustice of all that has happened. But it is a weak flame. They have doused it with too many cold showers and doctors’ tongues tamping it out as they tell me over and over that I am crazy. That there is something horrible that needs to be extinguished inside me.

“I know you don’t want to hear this, Alice, but you need to be honest with yourself. If what you say is true…” He leans forward. “If you really did kill that preacher, then it is your fault that your mother is dead. She was punished for his murder. If you claim his death, you have to claim hers too.”

His words tumble like ice into the pit of my belly.

When he looks at me now, it’s as if he can see through me. “Sometimes,” he says quietly, “we do things that we don’t mean to do. But it’s not really us.”

I flinch, wondering if he can see my shadow bending down as if to whisper in his ear.

“I’ve known women like you.” His voice chokes. “Loved them, even. But they have a sickness.” He stares at me with his cool gray eyes. “And that sickness makes them do bad things. Until you admit that you are ill, you can’t begin to be healed.”

My shadow covers his face, and for an instant it looks as if it is smothering him.

“I never would have had to shoot your mother if there wasn’t a dead man at her feet,” he continues. “And if you are the one who put him there, then you need to take responsibility.” He clasps his hands as if in prayer. “Then you can make a new life for yourself, free from your own darkness. That’s the only real way to honor your mother’s memory.”

Before I can reply, he stands. The light from the window washes over him, and his shadow dwarfs my own. “I think that’s enough for now,” he says. “But I want you to think about what I said. I really do want to help you, Alice.”

Then he leaves, locking the door behind him.

I am alone except for my shadow. And with each moment the sun sinks, she grows smaller.

He’s a liar, she hisses. It wasn’t you, it was the policeman! It’s his fault your mother’s dead.

I close my eyes and wait for the sun to set. When I open them again, she is nothing but a smudge of darkness.

“You’re right,” I whisper to her, watching as she disappears. “It wasn’t me. It was you. You killed my mother.”

9

Death Watch

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

He’s been watching me sleep.

I awake to find my husband sitting in a chair outside my cell. The moon’s light covers him in a weak milky glow, turning him back into a ghost.

In the small window above me a bird lands, flapping its black wings as it settles.

“Why are you trying so hard to die?” My husband stands, walking to the cell door and wrapping his hands around the bars.

My heart pounds against my chest. Realizing all the things he might have imagined as I lay here, I sit up quickly and try to cover myself with a blanket that is not there. “Why are you trying so hard to save me?”

“You know why.”

I do. Of course I do.

“You can’t keep me forever.”

His voice sinks to a whisper. “That’s not what you promised when you married me.”

Gooseflesh rises on my arms, and I remember exactly where we were when I made him that promise.

“You think you can tell that judge I’m crazy and he’ll let me walk out of here?” I laugh. “That he’ll just hand me over to you?”

His eyes glitter. “That’s the plan.”

He does not say what we both know. If I leave with him, I’ll never make it to the asylum. Without the judge’s conviction, I’ll just be another woman in a man’s hands without anyone to witness her fate.

Without a hanging, my future and my freedom rest solely with him.

And he does not mean to ever set me free.

Bending down, he picks up a folded newspaper from the floor and tosses it through the bars. “I thought you might like to see this.”

It lands at my feet. I take it and, standing, hold it up to the window’s glow. I can just make out the words.

ESCAPE FROM FORT SMITH JAIL

MURDERER KNOWN AS “THE BIRDMAN” ON THE LOOSE

It’s an old paper, printed when nobody much cared about the Birdman at all. But with my recent arrest, the press—hungry for every new detail about the Seamstress’s life—will soon enough put the pieces together.

Belle King’s only living lover is free. And he’ll be coming for her.

My lips tilt to a smile, and I press myself against my cage. “You haven’t got much time, then, do you?”

“No.” He meets my gaze. There are a hundred promises hidden in that stare. A thousand ways to hurt me. And if he says them, I don’t know if I can go on.

He opens his mouth to speak, but before he can, I grab his shirt and do the one thing that will stop him.

Our lips lock through the bars. I let our tongues dance, his desire burn.

When he pulls away, he looks stricken. He’s not going to let me go—to the gallows or anywhere that is not with him.

But it’s his choice, really. With my hanging, I’ve offered us both our freedom. All he has to do is leave.

And if he won’t, I know what I must do.

I’m going to have to kill a dead man twice.

Interlude

Cornelius Carnegie

Past

Las Vegas, New Mexico

Before they begin, he shuts the door. Better to keep precious things locked up.

“Come here.”

Sitting, he pats the empty space on his knees. The square foot of cloth on his hand-tailored pants is made from the most expensive French linen—a king’s seat just for her.

She moves as if to join him. But instead, she flits past, using her costume-jeweled fingers to crank the phonograph to life. Music, dark and tinny, wafts into the night. From outside comes the howl of coyotes, adding their voices to the song.

Slowly, the girl begins to dance. First her left hip rises, swelling against the silk of her dress—and oh, his eyes are hungry. His breath begins to speed. She can hear it from across the room. The stutter of it is like an engine choked with steam.

“Dammit, girl, I said come here.”

Now the right hip, and this time she raises her hand with it to the thin strap of her dress. It falls, as if by accident, across her silk-skinned shoulder. She summons the heat to her eyes. Lets it swell the gold of her irises, melt them. Then she turns their embers on him. He cannot move.

There is only the beating of their hearts across the room. They are the drums to the drumless symphony spilling from the phonograph’s brass horn. She does not want him, but she does want. She wants want, the sticky feel of it, the way it coats her mouth and spills down into the red crush of her heart. She is addicted.

The room is sweltering. Tonight is the rare night that even the desert’s velvet sky cannot bring relief. The hot devil’s breath of wind surges through an open window. It lifts the corner of a monogrammed sheet, tossed over the brutal outline of a hastily hacked-together wood bed, steel nails jutting. The walls themselves are raw, unsanded pine. An expensive Persian rug, royal blues and bloody rubies, sits atop a dirt floor. This is what money looks like in a hurry. A railroad man, roughing it for a week. A boy playing at camping, and here, spinning toward him now, is the very best toy of all.

She’d performed at the Duncan Opera House last night, and every man there had wanted her. Had imagined peeling the flimsy chiffon scarves from her body as she danced.

A Treasure from the Unknown. Priceless.

“Do you have the key?” She’s closer now, taunting him.

He nods, his lips wet with anticipation.

“Good. Give it to me.”

He hands it to her. A gold key with a death’s-head, made especially for her.

“Now hold out your hands.” He does. His whole body is shaking. She takes out a pair of rusted handcuffs from her bag on the floor and slips their cold metal onto his wrists.

“Are you ready?” He swallows hard. Nods.

This was the deal. She gets to choose the handcuffs. But if he can provide her a key that will unlock them—no matter what kind they are—once he’s free, she’s his to do with as he pleases.

He’s spent weeks with locksmiths, a fortune creating this single key. It can unlock any pair of handcuffs in the world.

He’s tried hundreds waiting for just this moment.

But the key is not to unlock the metal around his wrists. Not really.

It’s to unlock her.

He holds out his hands. “I’m ready.”

She comes closer, too close, although he never imagined such a thing possible with her, staring deep into his eyes.

And for just an instant, he is afraid.

There are the rumors, after all. They say that she’s possessed. That she’s followed by a demon and steals men’s souls.

Not that he believes them.

“Please.” He is begging now, but he doesn’t care. He needs her. Demands her.

In the corner, a small, dark shape shifts its wings. The man does not see it, but the girl knows it as well as she knows her own heart.

His paunch rises and falls with excitement and the shortness of breath born from too much rich food, too many good Cuban cigars. The beginnings of broken red capillaries spill across his nose in a drunkard’s flower. But there is life there too. Many possible years of gluttony and feeding and demanding and, yes, loving. For that is what he feels right now. Love for this girl.

No, not girl. Not even human. Despite what she looked like onstage, here he sees her for who she is. A goddess unleashed. There to grant him his every wish.

She finds his heart with her finger. Traces its shape atop his chest with her nail.

But she is only teasing him. Because the key is not all she asked for. There’s still the matter of payment.

Though he can hardly bear the distraction, he awkwardly forces his meaty paw into his pocket, handcuffs and all, and pulls out a folded black velvet cloth. He holds it up to her like an offering. Lifting her head, she takes it. Lets her gown fall farther, revealing not just one shoulder but two, so that if she did not hold the last bit to her chest she would be naked. Everything is like this with her, bringing him to the edge of fulfillment, then refusing to cross.

Now she pulls away to unwrap the small bit of velvet. Inside, sparkling against the black, are two bright stars.

Diamonds. She’s only asked for one, but he’s taking no chances. A pair of priceless earrings just for her.

“Two carats each,” he breathes. “And each one perfectly flawless.”

As if this is enough. As if she can be bought for all the stars in the sky.

But she rewards him with a smile.

“They’re beautiful,” she says. And they are. But not as beautiful as they will be, graced with blood.

Slipping the diamonds into her mouth, she bites down on the hard jewels with her teeth. She feels the want rise up, wild and monstrous.

“What,” she asks, the words whispering past the sparkle into his ear, “would you give me for a kiss?”

“Anything.” He says it before she can finish speaking. “Oh my God. Please. Anything.”

“No,” she says. “Everything.”

Then she reaches with the key and unlocks his wrists.

And just like that, she owns him.

And the want spills out.

And the want feeds.

In the corner, the dark shape watches, bright eyes glowing.

And all the while, the music plays on. “Do you want me to lock you back up?” she asks, smiling. “So that we can really play?”

“Yes,” he begs. “Oh God, yes.”

And so she does.

Cornelius Carnegie barely feels the knife.

Brass, then strings, then harp. An entire orchestra in that tiny machine. The music rises like an angel’s voice trying to call its way back to heaven.

But there is no heaven here. No God either.

In the corner, the dark shape shifts, gold eyes blinking.

Stepping over the dead man’s body, the Seamstress feeds the shadow her key.

And then, crossing to the window, she sets it free.

Part II

The Wicked

10

Sleeping Beauties

Past

Somewhere

Before I tell you how I married Reginald, let me tell you how I killed him. I prefer that order of events, anyhow, even if the greedy bastard has come back to life.

He had been following us for months.

Our mistake was in thinking a man like that could let something go. Something that did not belong to him.

Cal was not worried. He insisted that what would be would be. That people were mainly good. That I was good. That it would be all right.

Even when I told him what I’d done to the preacher, he still believed that I was someone worth saving.

That shadows were simply that—shadows, and nothing more. A trick of the light, not the true nature of things, not the true nature of me.

I could accept that, in theory. We had many tricks in the Damned. In particular, a macabre new act that made quite a lot of money. We called it “Sleeping Beauties.”

It was Ama’s idea. “I’m so goddamn sick of the bastards fucking pawing at me. Makes me want to claw their eyes out.”

Dom, who was never far from her side, was hovering. Earlier there was a particularly rowdy crowd, and a man had called a few insults up to her and then demanded “the Indian princess take off her top.”

It was the last thing he hollered, because Dom dragged him immediately out the tent door and beat him to a pulp, taking every last cent he had and threatening to cut off his balls if she ever saw him again.

We never did.

But there were plenty like him.

Men who believed if we were putting ourselves on display, it was because we were for sale.

The truth was, we were simply a distraction.

While Dom guarded the stage where Ama and I danced half-clothed, Cash, Cal, and the twins—sometimes even the fire-eaters—would be working their way through, picking pockets.

Unlike the men who tried to take us home as a prize, our thieves were never greedy. Taking only from the richest pockets and only what we needed so that nothing would be missed.

But when it was Ama’s and my time to work the crowds and the brothers tumbled onto the stage or the fire-eaters breathed bursts of flame over the heads of the crowd, that was when things took a turn.

The men would grow unruly, full of moonshine and the bravado of a crowd. When we’d edge up next to them in our stage clothes, sometimes they would slap a hand on our butts or breasts or slide their arms around our waists and refuse to let us go. Dom kept a close eye and bloodied more than one man’s lip, but it was hard. Eventually, we could not go out amongst them at all, even fully clothed.

Not even for the hanging.

Which was why we were there in the first place. To remember the soul being hanged. To remind them that they were not alone.

And short of letting Dom kill the whole goddamn crowd, we needed a new plan.

“Tell you what.” Ama’s eyes gleamed wickedly over the fire. We had been camped out somewhere west of St. Louis. It may have been the night Dom told us about the lady and the tiger, or maybe not. Either way, something had got Ama thinking. “I think we should cheat the assholes. Give them the one thing they can’t fuck.”

“Ama!” Dom frowned. “Language.”

“Sorry. The two things they can’t fuck. You and me, Alice.” She grinned. “Except we’ll be dead.”

So that was what we did. And it was a success. The rest of the Damned played their parts, putting on a magnificent performance. Cash was a magician who spoke his eloquent poetry to the crowd and told the tale of two sisters, cursed at birth, beautiful but never to wake. They would grow older but never see the sun’s light until true love’s kiss awakened them.

Of course, Ama and I looked nothing alike, but this didn’t seem to bother anyone much.

What the men really cared about was seeing two dead girls half-naked.

Cash, who was as good a carpenter as a poet, took two old Fisk coffins and expanded the glass tops so that our entire bodies were visible. Ama and I simply lay in them, mostly naked but for some carefully placed flowers. Truly, the men couldn’t see anything, but it was the illusion of seeing something they liked.

Anyway, Cash would tell his tale, letting in the men to our tent five or ten at a time. Then he’d pull away the midnight-black blankets, really just old sheets we’d stolen off somebody’s line and dyed, and there we’d be. Two beautiful princesses lying dead in glass coffins.

The men got twenty seconds to look. No more, no less.

Anyone who tried to linger was helpfully escorted off by Dom.

The men loved that we were nearly naked and pretty, but it was the fact that we were purportedly dead that sold them. Everyone knew it was an act, of course, but they could never figure out how we did it so well. How we could just lie there for hours looking like we weren’t breathing at all.

The truth was, those coffins were hot, and lying there for so long, even with breaks, would have been unbearable. So I concocted us a sleeping potion.

My mother had not just known herbs to help a woman in a delicate situation. She’d grown others too. One of them was belladonna.

A little bit could ease the pain of menses. More could give an ailing woman sleep. And more yet would make the sleep so deep it looked like death.

But too much, and it would be.

I was careful. I gave us just enough to soothe our limbs into a sticky sleep and taught Ama the correct proportions too.

Hours would fly by like minutes, and when we’d come out of the depths after a day of viewers, we’d crawl out into the night slowly, like flies crawling out of honey.

Mostly, the medicine kept us under, but every now and again, I’d rise to the surface. I’d keep my eyes closed, but I could sense the men staring down at me. Hear their awed whispers.

We didn’t do it often. It took a toll on us, the belladonna. We’d feel its effect for days. So only rarely, in particular towns in particular places, did we bring out the Sleeping Beauties. Other than the hangover, it was a pleasant job to play dead.

One week before I killed my husband, he came to see me dead. His darkness hovered over me, like the storm clouds waiting to break over the mountains. The kind whose lightning carried fire, burning everything it touches to the ground.

I did not open my eyes, but I could feel him.

Watching me like a sick god.

There is more. So much more.

How he followed us to our last show. How he watched me as I danced with the tiger.

Sometimes I think if I’d only opened my eyes in my coffin and stared straight back at him—been brave enough to face him at the beginning—I could have stopped it all.

But none of that matters now. I told you I’d tell you how I killed him, and here it is.

I plunged a knife into his gut and dragged his bloodied body with Cal to the banks of a river, where we threw him off a cliff.

I should have been more careful. Plucked out his goddamn heart. Weighted his body with stones so no one could ever find it again.

But I was still new at killing, and there was another dead man back at the tent, and a tiger, and the police, looking for Cal.

Enough.

All that comes later.

For now, let’s just watch my husband tumble to what should have been his grave. Watch the air steal his blood as he flies twenty feet down so that his soul is closer to Hell.

Let’s put a glass box over the moment and watch him sleeping. Silent. And for a time, in our hearts and minds, dead.

11

The Rabbit

Four Years Prior

Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum

On Sundays, they make us dance.

The male staff—the laundry workers, the doctors, and the repairmen—all take female patients as partners.

For some, it is a way to humiliate. There is one groundskeeper who likes nothing more than to get a woman who used to be the mayor’s wife—before she cheated on him—and make her take his dirt-stained hands as he twirls her about the locked room, whispering obscenities in her ear.

Sometimes I get a kind boy, a laundry worker with corn-blond hair and a shy smile, and he makes me feel something like a human again.

But on the days I get the superintendent, I suffer the worst sort of indignity—he does not look at me, he looks through me.

And I have to spin and twirl with the other women, waltzing across the ascetic floors of the second story of the women’s ward, where all the windows have black bars so that we might not even be allowed the dignity of leaping from them.

The female staff are no better. Overworked and underpaid, they do whatever it takes to keep us in line. A pinch here, an extra dose of mind-numbing medicine there, or, if a patient gets too bad, a straitjacket and solitary confinement. The box is a room without light in the basement that we all dread, with quilted walls to soak up our screams.

Women who come out of that room are never the same. My roommate, Sadie, is a frequent occupant. A girl my age whose eyes look a hundred. She sleeps next to me, and when the lights go out, she creeps from her bed into mine and pinches my skin until I scream.

But she is better than my dreams.

Because in those, my shadow waits. And I must watch her pick up the gun and pull its trigger over and over again. Only this time it is not the preacher she shoots but my mother.

“Alice, what have you done?” Mama whispers in my dreams, her face a bloody hole. “What have you done?”

And so I don’t sleep. I die.

Over and over again I kill the part of me that brought me here and killed my mother.

I ignore my shadow’s constant urging to hurt someone or something.

I swear I will never hurt anyone again. I try, instead, to disappear.

Once, when I was a little girl, I saw a rabbit do the same. I was walking in the woods with my mother. She was teaching me the names of plants she used to help the women who came to her.

We were so quiet that the animal kingdom must have thought us one of her own. As I knelt beside my mother, touching the feathered leaves of a fern, a figure hurtled down from the sky overhead. A hawk, diving so fast my eyes could hardly catch the shape. Down, down, down with claws spread, and only then did I see the rabbit. It was so still that I was certain that the hawk would grab it.

Then the creature did a strange thing. It flung its gray-mottled body onto the ground and lay there, eyes wide open.

The hawk swerved at the last minute and rose back into the air.

I was certain that it had died of fear. Such things happened. Creatures’ hearts burst from fright.

I ran over to it and reached out a hand to stroke the corpse.

Unmoving, quiet, eyes wide and shiny, the dead thing suddenly leapt up and, quicker than the surprised shriek that escaped my lips, raced farther into the forest.

“But it was dead, Mama,” I said, child eyes wide. “That bunny came back from the dead.”

My mother’s eyes looked faraway, and though there was a smile on her lips, it did not travel to her face. She crouched down until she was at my height and then tenderly took hold of my arm. “It was just playing, Alice. Sometimes, to keep from being eaten, an animal must pretend they are dead.” I wondered then, as I had wondered so many times before, if she was thinking of my father. A man whose name she would never speak.

In the asylum, I am the rabbit.

And each day, I let the hawk get close enough to smell me.

I spend as much time in the visitors’ room as they will let me. It is the only space that they try to make presentable for others. There are real chairs there, padded velvet ones with thick armrests. And a fire. Even a few paintings on the walls. Only the patients who are still sane enough to contain themselves are allowed inside. The ones who make the rich husbands dropping off their wives and daughters feel better about doing so. The men who enjoy the glass of whiskey the superintendent provides for them each visit. Who chat with the other visiting men as they congratulate themselves on what a good job they are doing taking care of the ones they love. Just look at that sweet, calm girl over there. Perhaps someday my daughter, my wife, will be so docile.

And so I comb my hair, keep myself quiet, and spend my hours smiling at nothing.

Some days it is just me and the cleaner. She is a young Black girl near my age who always seems to be there, even when the room is already spotless. When the husbands come to visit, she hovers by their tables, ready to help.

I do what I can to stay calm. Walk the room a hundred times. Count the cracks in the ceiling. Sink into one of the chairs, freshly wiped clean of some poor lobotomized woman’s drool, and pretend to sew.

Cross-stitch, slip stitch, basting, zigzag, diamond.

I close my eyes and imagine my mother’s hand is there guiding me, just like she did when I was first learning. Sometimes I can almost feel it.

But the doctors are right. There is something wicked inside me, waiting to get out.

One day, I find my fingers shaking, and no matter how I try, I cannot remember how to make them stop. I begin to think about plunging them into one of the doctors’ eyes.

A hand lands gently on my own. “Hey.”

I look up. The cleaning girl stands over me, a mop in her hand.

She shakes her head. “Don’t go doing that, now. Close your eyes. Hold still.”

I do. Her hand is a grounding presence. Its heat travels deep through my skin and steadies me.

“There,” she says, letting go. She looks around the room. The doctor has just left, and we are alone. She bends down so that we are at eye level. It’s the first time in a long time that someone has bothered to speak to me like a human. She meets my eyes with a steady gaze. “You aren’t crazy, are you?”

I shake my head, unsure if this is a lie.

“I didn’t think so. I’ve been watching you. You seem sane.”

I cannot tell you what it is to be seen. To be really and truly seen after you have spent so many days beginning to wonder if you exist at all.

“What’s your name?”

For a horrible moment I can’t remember. But then I do. “Alice,” I tell her desperately. “My name is Alice.”

“Nice to meet you, Alice,” she says softly. “My name is Mary Parker.”

And then she leans in close to whisper in my ear. “How would you like to get out?”

12

A Confession

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

“Tell me about the first man you killed. Viktor Crane.”

The sheriff leans forward on his unsteady chair, the same one my husband sat on last night. Behind him is Brownie, gun at the hip. Both men have stayed behind the cell’s locked bars.

“You mean the first one they found.”

I hear the sheriff’s quick intake of breath.

The judge has given Hicks one full day to take my confession and provide the court with a convincing argument that I have actually committed a crime. “Otherwise”—scrunch, scrunch—“I can’t think of any reason…providing he still wants you…your husband shouldn’t have you back, Miss Springer. You are, after all, his property, and it would sure as hell save the court a lot of trouble.”

In other words, the sheriff needs another body. Though what he really wants is a diamond.

“That’s right.” Hicks nods. “Viktor Crane. The fellow they found out in Deadwood whose heart you’d stolen.”

“That man had no heart. Speaking of which, where is my husband?”

I can’t believe he would miss this if he knew it was happening. Which means that he clearly does not.

As if to confirm my suspicions, the sheriff looks uneasily behind him toward the stairs. “Don’t you worry about him. What about the other fellows, then? The ones they haven’t found. There’s three men still missing, including Frederick Fairchild.” He leans close. “Where are they buried, and do they all got diamonds instead of hearts?”

Though I fully intend to give him a body, I make him wait.

“There were rumors that you were charging men a diamond to watch you dance in private,” Hicks says. “That true?”

“Men offered me all number of things to watch me dance. Including their hearts.”

Hicks slams his hands against the bars in frustration. I don’t move. He glances nervously behind him again.

“Mr. Hicks. Sir.” Brownie’s got a worried look, wrinkling his brow. “I think maybe we’d better wait for Mr. Salinger. He’s going to be awfully unhappy to know you’ve started without him.”

“Why don’t you go on upstairs and wait for him,” Hicks says.

“Now, Sheriff, I hate to leave you—”

“Go on, now! Git!”

With another worried look in my direction, Brownie exits.

The sheriff shakes his head as if we are both in on the same joke. “Can’t believe I got stuck with that old man as my jailer. You don’t know what unbelievably bad timing you have, Miss King. I had myself a real young fellow before this who went farther out west to try his luck just before you came. Had to hire Brownie quick-like, right off the streets. You’d be shocked how hard it is to find good help.”

“Now, I can’t imagine why anyone would not want to work for you.”

He misses my sarcasm and leans closer.

“Look here.” He lowers his voice. “Perhaps you and I can make a deal.”

I go to him. “Yes, Sheriff. Perhaps we can. I’m going to give you two locations, and I want you to immediately send telegrams to the local law there. They will find the corpses in the exact places I have specified. They will be in a…condition that can leave no doubt that it was me who killed them.” I smile. “They’ll both be missing their hearts. It’s a win-win, Sheriff. You’ll get the reputation for one of the bravest lawmen in the West—the man who brought down Belle King—and I’ll get my hanging. What do you say?”

He reaches up to stroke his mustache. “Do one of them bodies got the Queen’s Ransom in it?”

I smile sadly. “I’m afraid not, Sheriff.”

“How about the other diamonds? All those men who went missing were owners of some real expensive—”

“What’s the meaning of this!” Loud footsteps herald the presence of my husband, who charges into the limekiln with Brownie closely behind him. He faces the sheriff with fury in his eyes. “What the hell are you doing questioning her without me?”

Hicks cringes backward. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s only, I thought that since you were married to her it were a conflict of interest, like.”

“I am still a United States marshal,” my husband answers coolly. “Which means that I am the one in charge.”

“Yes, sir.”

He shoves a newspaper into the sheriff’s chest. It’s new. A fresh take on the headline my husband showed me last night. The press connected the dots.

ESCAPED PRISONER IS BELIEVED TO BE MURDERESS’S LOVER

“Have you seen this?”

Clearly not liking his treatment, and also very clearly embarrassed, the sheriff unfolds it stiffly, straightening out his rumpled shirt as he does so. “I don’t much read papers,” he allows. “I prefer to get my news firsthand.”

My husband’s voice is trembling. I see his eyes skirt over me, take stock of my face, my hands, my body, looking for any sort of injury that was not done by him.

I shake my head.

He returns his attention to the sheriff and points at the front page. “Well, you’d better read it. Belle King’s got a sweetheart out there who is an escaped killer. And if the press is right, he’s on his way here to free her. Which means”—he pulls himself up to his full height; it’s not really that tall but does seem to intimidate the sheriff—“you had better finish your questions so that I can get my wife somewhere safe. That man means to ruin her.”

“He already has,” I say softly from my place behind bars.

My husband locks eyes with me, and I let the meaning of my words sink in as I wink. “Over and over again. Most times I quite enjoyed it.”

“Enough.” His voice comes out ragged. “Sheriff, you were meant to get a confession from her. Did you?”

“Almost,” I say. “I’m afraid you interrupted us, so here it is, for the record. I killed Bernhard Price and Cornelius Carnegie. You can find Cornelius on a cliff by the river in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and Bernhard on a ranch just outside of Abilene, Texas. If you give me a pen and paper, I’ll be happy to provide you a map.”

My husband flinches.

“And the diamonds?” Hicks can’t help himself. “That Cornelius fellow’s wife said two of her diamond earrings were missing—heirlooms passed down from a royal family in France. And the Price family vault was missing a rare blue diamond.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “But I’m afraid those will be gone. I left orders for them to be collected.”

“Collected?” Hicks looks angry enough to spit. “By whom?”

But it’s Brownie who speaks. “It’s the Birdman, isn’t it, Miss King? Your lover. You left those diamonds for him, and now he’s coming for you.” He peers at me curiously. “Is that right?”

I nod. “I suspect he’s closer than you might think.”

“What about the Queen’s Ransom?” Hicks cuts in. “Where’s that? You leave that for him too?”

I grin. “Another time, Sheriff. As for now, how about you bring that pen and paper I asked for?”

“I’ll get it, Miss King,” Brownie says. “But one last question. If you’ll indulge an old man.”

I nod. As he leans closer, I think I notice something in his breast pocket. A peek of red. But when he sees me looking, he reaches up and quickly pushes it back down.

“Those men you put the diamonds in. What did you do with their hearts?”

“Their hearts?” I run my tongue across my lips, just the way I used to do onstage. The sight of it suggests a thousand things to a thousand men.

“Did you keep ’em?” The sheriff slaps his hand on his thigh. “By God, I bet you did. I bet you had a whole collection, didn’t you? Just like those Bloody Bender women, who kept the trinkets from the men they lured to their deaths.”

He looks as though he’s solved a great mystery, as proud as a babe who understands for the first time that if it cries, its mother will bring it milk.

They want a monster, and so I give it to them.

“Ah, Sheriff Hicks, of course not. I never kept any of those poor men’s hearts.”

“But…” He looks horribly disappointed, his dull brow furrowing. “Why did you cut them out? What the hell did you do with them?”

“I did what anyone offered a delicate piece of meat might do.” My lips stretch wide over my teeth in a fearsome grin. “I ate them.”

13

Mary Parker

Four Years Prior

Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum

Mary Parker is not a good girl. Which is exactly why I like her.

“Let’s get something straight,” she tells me. “I’m not your friend. If I get you out of here, I’m going to want something in return.”

We are standing in one of the few private places in the whole building, a small stairwell outside the visiting room. Mary Parker has perfected the art of being invisible. Which, considering her looks, is no small task.

She is a natural beauty, though no one in that asylum would ever know it. One has to look very closely to get an inkling of who she is at all. She wears her white cleaner’s cap low over her high, clear forehead, and her too-large apron hides the ample curves beneath her worn-out dress. She walks with a slouch, though I have seen her walking at times she thinks no one is watching, and then it’s more like a queen.

“What do you want?” I ask her.

“Nothing much.” Mary pulls a silver tin out of her pocket and shakes out a cigarette. “Just a name.”

“And how do I get that?”

She lights the cigarette. “You gamble for it.”

The superintendent of the asylum has, Mary tells me, quite a number of wealthy friends. Men he’s done favors for and who, in turn, do favors for him. And on the first Sunday of each month he invites them to an exclusive game of cards on the asylum’s dime.

“How can he do that?” I ask angrily. “Isn’t it illegal?”

Mary clucks her tongue. “You’ve got no idea, do you? Asylums are big business. Pipeline straight to the government’s pocketbooks. Last superintendent they had here went on to be a senator himself. Men come here to set up their own little empire and learn to play with government money. Then they move on to run prisons or private hospitals.”

“And in the meantime, they play poker.”

“Not just poker,” Mary says. “They play the stock market. And while they do that, they enjoy some entertainment.”

“What kind of entertainment?”

“Female patients. The superintendent chooses the prettiest girls. Then he cleans them up and hands them out as party favors.”

I stare at her, incredulous. “You want me to be a party favor?”

“I want you to get in the back room. That’s where the men take the girls if they want a little private time.” A look of disgust flashes across her face.

“That sounds like rape,” I say flatly. “Not a way out.”

“It is a risk,” she allows, ashing her cigarette onto the ground.

She has not once inhaled, just lit her cigarette and let it burn. When I raise a questioning eyebrow, she shrugs.

“I like the smell.” And then she looks at me, fully taking me in as if deciding how much of herself to reveal. “And I have a theory that the men like it too. The ones that visit the asylum. Many of them smoke, and so if they smell it on me, there is something about it that’s comforting. Like I’m just another part of themselves. It lets me get closer.”

Mary Parker, I’m learning, is full of secrets.

“So, what? You want me to steal something from one of the men?”

“I only steal what’s free,” she says. “Not that you are in a moral position to judge.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She flicks more ash from her cigarette onto the floor. “I heard you killed a man.” Her eyes—golden brown and piercing—meet mine. “That true?”

I hesitate. She has just told me that she is not my friend, and yet, I think, in another time and place, she might be. Or, at least, I’d want her to be. And in this moment, I understand that she is testing me. So I tell her the truth.

“Not one who didn’t deserve it,” I say quietly.

She nods. “There are several who do. Me, I don’t have the stomach for it. But I’m very good at taking their money.”

“I thought you said you only steal what’s free.”

I think back to all the times I saw her in the visiting room, offering the full tables of men come to see their wives and daughters a refreshment. I never saw Mary take anything from these men, but she was certainly in there often enough to do so.

“I don’t steal their money, I take it,” she says. “There’s a difference.”

“So what do you steal?” I ask. Whatever it is, she’s brave to do so. She’s in Kentucky, only years after the war and legal slavery, and if they found out that she took anything from those men, no matter how small the trinket, I suspect they’d do more than fire her.

“Information,” she says, voice hushed, and I get the sense that she’s telling me something that she hasn’t told many people before. “Stocks. Trading tips. These men think they’re safe talking about things like that in here surrounded by workers and crazy women.” She laughs. “I’ve had rich men sit at that table downstairs and make million-dollar deals with me no more than two feet away and pouring them coffee.”

“But what can you possibly do with information?”

“What anyone with a brain would do,” she says calmly. “I take their tips about which stocks are rising, and I buy them.”

“Can you do that?” I don’t mean to sound so incredulous, but the truth is that she is a woman and Black in a world of white men.

She shrugs. “I’m already doing it. There are boys on the street who clean up good enough with a borrowed suit and a bath. They’re more than happy to make my deals for a few dollars.”

Mary’s cigarette burns to its last glowing end, and she tosses it onto the stone floor, stomping it beneath her sensible and well-polished brown boot. The smell of tobacco smoke flares, then dissipates entirely. When she speaks again, there is an edge to her words. “Not for long, though. After tomorrow night, I’ll have so much money those men won’t be able to ignore me.”

I feel a catch in my throat. So this is why she’s told me so much about herself. Whatever she wants from me, it must be dangerous. “What happens tomorrow night?”

“Everything.” Excitement buzzes beneath her words. “There’s big men coming. The biggest. Two senators and a governor. And they aren’t just talking stocks, they’re making one. A new company to supply steel to the railroads. I need you to find out the name of that stock and when they plan to go public.”

“Why do you need me?” I don’t like the way she’s looking at me, like a crow that’s found something useful it can pick apart for its nest. “Why can’t you do it yourself? Listen in as you always do when you’re serving them whiskey.”

“You think I wouldn’t?” Her high forehead wrinkles in anger. “But for once in their lives these men have gotten a little sense. No servers in the card room.” She rolls her eyes. “We’re to prepare their food and drinks and leave them on a table outside. Nobody else is to come inside.”

“Except the female patients,” I say, understanding.

“Those men will still want their entertainment.” Mary nods. “And there’s nothing a few crazy women can do to hurt them.” She grins. “At least, that’s what they think.”

“How do you know I’ll get asked to go to the card game?”

She looks at me like I’m being ridiculous. “You’re young, you’re pretty, and you don’t scream. Yet. They’ll choose you. If they wait any longer, this place will ruin you before they can.”

Her words are not exactly comforting.

“So you want me to go in and get the name of the railroad stock they’re creating and tell you,” I say. “But what if one of those men wants me to go into the back room with them?”

“You’d better hope they do,” she says. “That back room, that’s your way out.”

I don’t speak. I’m trying to take in what she is suggesting.

“I’m part of the cleaning crew before the party,” Mary says. “And that back room, it’s got a door to the outside. I can make sure it’s unlocked.”

“Won’t they know it’s you?”

“There are five of us working that party. No way to prove it.” Her eyes narrow. “Besides, this is the last night I’m ever gonna work for these bastards. After you tell me the name of the stock, I’m gone. Headed to California.” Her eyes shine. “I’m going to start a new life. Buy my mother and brothers the house that they deserve.”

Somewhere, from the depths of the asylum, I hear a woman’s scream.

“But what about the room?” I whisper. “If I go in there with one of those men, how do I keep him from…doing something?”

“That’s the gamble,” Mary says coolly. “But if you don’t take it there, you’ll take it in here. One of the laundry boys. A doctor. Somebody who thinks they can have you. It’s your choice.”

“And how do I get them to leave me alone long enough to get out the back door?”

For the first time in our conversation, I see something like tenderness cross her face. “You’re clever, Alice. It’s why I picked you. Girls like us, we have to be clever.”

“And if we aren’t?”

She shakes her head, brown eyes serious. “Let’s not find out.”

14

Midnight Visitors

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

I didn’t eat their hearts.

My goodness, by this point in the story I should hope you know me better than that. To put such a vile thing in my mouth? Never.

The hearts were simply symbolic. Nothing more. I took them because they were offered, and then I threw them away for the birds to eat. The same thing they would have done to mine, I’ve no doubt, should I have been foolish enough to give it.

After I reveal the locations of the bodies, I am left in my cell to wait. Somewhere near midnight, I hear footsteps. I’m somewhat worried it will be my husband, come to watch me sleep again, but it is only the sheriff.

In his hands is a tray with my evening meal.

He likes to make me guess at my mealtimes. It gives him some small sense of power.

“Hello, Sheriff.”

“Brought you your dinner,” he says, and even in the dark of the cell, I can see by the moonlight leaking through my small window—nearly full now—that he is unsteady on his feet. Probably drunk from a night spent indulging at the festivities in town. Acting the hero after my latest confession and lying to anyone who will listen about what he had to do to get it. Telling them that he has single-handedly made sure I’ll hang.

And when he slides the tray through the bars, a meager meal of bread and a single leg of chicken, I see that he is shaking.

But it’s not alcohol I smell. It’s fear.

Calmly, I take the tray and set it on the small table bolted beside my cot. My back is to him, but I can hear the metal key as it slides into the lock. The door creaks open. And then there is the very quiet tap of a steel-toed boot placed on the ground.

I don’t turn around. “Whatever you’re about to do, Sheriff, I wouldn’t.”

He stops midstep.

“I would take myself right back outside of this cell and lock the door. A man only has one life, you know.”

Sitting down at the table, I pick up the piece of bread. It is dry and hard. “I’d head straight upstairs, where it’s safe, and tell Brownie to bring me a pat of butter. Fresh, mind you. Nothing that’s gone off.” Behind me, I can hear his breathing grow louder. “There’s nothing I hate more than sour butter.”

The fool. I can feel all my senses awakening, the hair on my arms standing to attention in warning.

And whatever it is, he’s had to work up the nerve to come here alone.

I pick up the chicken leg and slip the skin off with my fingers. Roasted, not fried, which is a shame. Chickens are filthy birds, and I can only ever stomach them when they are treated to hot oil first.

The sound of another footstep, placed with the care of a child who’s read about huntsmen in his storybooks and played at the game of being one in the woods without much success. He still means to try whatever it is he came to do.

And in my experience, men only want two things when they make it a point to get a woman alone. To despoil them or to kill them. Sometimes both.

I sigh. “You know, we had such a nice day together, Sheriff. Shame to ruin it now.”

His breath audibly catches in his throat.

I rip the final bit of meat off the chicken leg and slip the bone into my mouth, biting down. It snaps between my teeth. Carefully, I pull the broken shards from my mouth.

A real bone knife needs to be sharpened on stone. Its blade will never be as strong or as fine as a metal one, but a stone-sharpened bone knife can still slice flesh.

I do not have the time or the luxury to sharpen this one.

It will not slice, but it will puncture something soft.

An eye.

A throat.

All it needs is the right amount of force behind it.

Another booted step.

I spin around, grabbing the body behind me and folding it to me like a lover.

He does not resist.

Hicks sinks against me as if he’s been waiting for this moment his whole life. I hold him. My fingers find the hummingbird pulse of his throat, and gently I place the jagged piece of bone against it.

And, oh, it is sweet. I can’t help myself. I want him. I want this. I want to feel the life of a man like him slip away between my fingers in silky ribbons of warm blood.

“We’ve been here before,” I whisper. “Silly to make the same mistake.” I can feel his heartbeat slowing. Feel him losing himself to me. “Unless you want it. Death.” Gently, I press my lips to his ear, let my words vibrate along his skin. “Some men do.”

“Please,” he says, his breath salty in my ear. “You’ve got it all wrong.”

For the first time, I look over his shoulder. I see the cell door, swung open, its maw a black hole gaping toward freedom. Freedom my husband would use to cage me again in his own way once he got his hands on me.

And the strange truth of why he’s come alone finally sets in. My fingers tighten on the bone. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Go on.” He chokes on the words, barely able to get them out. “You’re free.”

He has left the door open for me. He is trying to let me go.

“I don’t want to kill you,” I say. I do want to kill him. My body aches with the wanting.

But though I am not a patient woman, what I need to do right now is wait. By morning they will have found the two bodies to which I confessed, and I can hang.

Killing the sheriff now will simply prolong things.

And if I kill him in my cell, there is a good chance that my husband will find us first. That he will simply make the sheriff’s body disappear or say that it was him who killed Hicks, an act of self-defense when the man tried to take advantage of his wife.

No. I can’t kill him.

Not here. Not now.

“If you don’t want to die,” I say, forcing myself to let him go, “you’d better go shut that door.”

The poor man’s lip quivers. “But…I’m letting you go.”

“And who told you to do that?” Because it’s obvious, suddenly, that the man is not acting alone. He would never have the nerve or the intelligence to do so. “Why do you want to let me free?”

“She told me to,” he whispers, like a chastised child. “A very well-off lady. Said you wouldn’t take it but that at least I should offer. Gave me a letter to give you too.”

He holds out an envelope, and I take it.

“Must have paid you a lot for you to consider letting me go,” I say. “What about your reputation? What did she promise you?”

I turn the letter over, and my heart leaps at the familiar script.

“Didn’t promise me nothing,” he says. “I was just trying to be nice. If you can’t—”

I have the bone shard pressed beneath his eye and my arm chains wrapped around his neck before he can move. I will tolerate many things, but I will not tolerate a man who is impolite.

“Try again,” I say. “What did she promise you?”

“The diamond,” he says. “She paid me five hundred dollars and promised me the Queen’s Ransom if I let you go.”

I laugh. “And you believed her.”

He looks shamed. “Like I said, she paid me a good bit of money. And she had no reason to lie. She was a respectable woman. Said she’d hired private detectives to find your last victim and she knows exactly where it is.”

“And did she tell you why she wanted to let me go free?”

He nods, swallowing so hard his poor Adam’s apple jumps like a fishing bobber as he realizes his mistake. “She said she was your friend.”

“Well, she lied. Mary Parker has never been my friend.”

I let him go, dropping the shard of bone to the ground. I slip my chicken-greased finger underneath the envelope’s seal and open it.

Pulling out the letter, I hold it to the moon’s bright light.

Dear Alice, it begins. The words are written in a neat hand on a delicate scented paper. The scent itself is lilac, but it is laced with the unmistakable bouquet of cigarette smoke.

Once again, I’m offering you an open door. As I said before, I like to make good on all my promises. Should you choose not to take it—and knowing your stubborn nature, I do fear this will be the case—I have provided you a tomb for after your hanging and shall very much look forward to seeing you dead.

Yours,

Mary Parker

I smile and, folding the letter, hand it back to the sheriff. “I’m afraid this woman made promises she can’t keep,” I say, slowly unwrapping the chain from around his neck.

I’ve no doubt the skin there is already growing red. In fact, it has probably not healed from our last encounter.

But some men never do learn.

He stumbles away, clearly unsure of where to go or what to do.

“Do you want the diamond?” I say. “The Queen’s Ransom? You would trade your reputation as a lawman to become one of the richest men in the world?”

“Yes,” he says without hesitation. Greed is his demon, and it is an easy one to feed.

“Well, I’m the only one who can give it to you. And I will. But first you must make sure they find those bodies I told you about. Do you understand?”

He nods. Then dares to ask the one question that he can’t shake. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“You can’t,” I say simply. “All of life is a gamble, Sheriff. This is yours. The question is, is it a game you’re brave enough to play?”

He nods again.

“Good. Now let me eat in peace.”

He leaves.

Some men always did choose the wrong bets.

15

Some Fun

Four Years Prior

Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum

The night of the card party, a nurse I’ve never seen before with thin brown hair and large rabbit teeth appears in the dining hall. The air is full of uneasy chatter and the smell of boiled vegetables. The nurse taps the shoulder of a young blond woman, who rises to follow her, and then it’s my turn.

The superintendent chose the women for his card game at that day’s dance, tying red ribbons around our wrists.

“Get up,” the nurse says, looking dubiously at the ribbon tied around my wrist and then back at my face. I know what she is seeing—a filthy child with an obstinate jaw, frame grown skeletal from the poor nutrition behind these walls, and my mother’s yellow eyes, which have always made me look slightly too feline. Untrustworthy. She glances at the ribbon again. “You didn’t steal that, did ya?”

“No, ma’am.” I remember my manners from the few times my mother took me to the houses she sewed for in town. I smile and curtsy just as I did to those women.

It seems to do the trick. “Maybe you just need cleaned up some,” she allows. And so I follow the rabbit-toothed nurse and the blond girl into the bath. There, I am shoved into a freezing tub of water and scrubbed within an inch of my life. When I emerge, I am given a dress. It’s cleaner than my old one but still worn. It is plain and the sort of gray that used to be white, its hem uneven. My mother would never have allowed such a dress to leave our care, and I shudder to think what patient brought this in and where she is now.

Surely, she will never need a dress again.

“Smile,” the nurse commands as she leads me back to the dining room to wait. “You’re a lucky girl to get to go to a party and have some fun.”

I go docilely, plastering a wide smile across my face. The gesture feels foreign. My lips, it seems, have forgotten how to make that shape, and I feel like someone’s poorly carved jack-o’-lantern on All Hallows’ Eve.

But when I sit down at a table, I find Sadie, with her pale blue eyes and her gold hair prettily combed. Thinking of her pinching fingers, I try to get away, but she smiles sweetly, although I’m not entirely sure it is at me. In fact, her eyes seem to drift above me to a space on the wall. But when I turn, there’s nothing there. Two other girls join us and the nurse tells us to stand and we file into a line behind her.

Sadie sidles up beside me and roughly grabs my hand, pulling me to her to whisper in my ear. “I’m gonna get out,” she says, and smiles again. She does meet my gaze, but her eyes are hot and bright. “Want me to tell you how?”

My fingers ache with the pressure of her grip, but she only squeezes harder. “I thought you might try it too.” When she smiles this time, she shows her teeth, and I notice that the front three are brown. “You ain’t crazy yet, are yeh?”

“No,” I say, though to be honest, in this moment I’m not so sure. I’d thought Mary’s plan for my escape was a rare one, crafted just for me, but now that this girl with her fetid breath and wild eyes is telling me she has one, I suddenly wonder if I’ve made a very grave mistake. Perhaps Mary Parker has a deal with all the women going to this party.

Perhaps she has a deal with the men upstairs too. The superintendent and all his friends, luring the ripest girls to him and ensuring they all go in the back room.

“There’s men up there,” Sadie says, slipping her arm into mine cozily as if we’re two great friends on a spring walk. “They choose from the nicest ladies, and then they take them away for a little fun. And if we do what they say, we can get out.”

My stomach drops. So it’s true. Mary Parker has betrayed me. She has told all the girls that she’ll leave the door unlocked so they’ll go with these men.

“It’s a lie,” I say, wrenching my arm from Sadie. My heart sinks. “There’s no way out.”

But Sadie is not deterred. In the darkness of the hallway, her sick eyes gleam. “Oh, yes, there is. I told you. You just have to get one of the men to go in the back room with you. Let them have a little fun.”

I try to walk ahead, but she follows behind me, her steps hot on my heels. “You got to make sure they finish the job, though. And you have to time it just right with your moon.”

I stop. The poor child is making no sense. She can’t even keep the fake plan straight.

“That’s not right.”

“Oh, but it is.” Her mottled grin grows wider. “I’m in the growing moon now, and I’m going to get a big strong one to choose me and I’ll hold him tight until he plants his seed.”

I shake my head at her in horror. “You mean, you want them to get you pregnant?” Poor Sadie. Though she’s been cruel to me, I don’t wish her this delusion. “You think if you get pregnant by one of those men, he’ll take you out of here?”

Her eyes narrow. “I’m not stupid. They ain’t never going to take me out of here. But the baby will.”

I feel a coldness in the pit of my stomach spread. “What do you mean?”

“Lots of women get pregnant in here. But there ain’t never no babies. Do you know what happens to them?”

Suddenly, I don’t want to hear the rest. Even if it is rambling lies. But she won’t stop now.

“When the women go into labor, they take them down, down, down the stairs and into the tunnels beneath. There’s miles of ’em; whiskey runners used to use them.”

I can’t help myself. “What happens next?”

“Abortion’s a sin, so they help the women have their babies and then they leave the wee things underground.” Her mouth twists into a grin. “So many little ghost babies down there. Some nights, you can still hear them cry.”

“Stop,” I say, because it’s too horrible.

But she is no longer even talking to me. She is speaking to herself and the devil that has guided her to this plan. “They leave the babies and take the women back upstairs so that nobody never knows they was pregnant at all.”

I stop moving. She walks past me, but I can still hear her, her words trailing along the hall.

“But not me.” I see the shadow of her hands clutching and unclenching her dress as she speaks. “They can keep my ghost baby but not me. When I’m in those tunnels, I’m going to run.”

And then she begins to laugh and laugh, and I don’t know how she will ever stop, and I close my eyes and hold completely still.

But for an instant, from the stone floors beneath my feet, I swear I can hear the sound of a child’s cry.

16

A Bargain

Past

Somewhere

Here is what no one talks about.

Sometimes a wild thing asks to be tamed. It is why, after all, the wolves came so close to the flickering fires in the mouths of caves.

Yes, I’ll let you stroke my fur, and yes, I’ll keep your home mice-free. All you have to do is feed me and let me rest where it is warm.

From cold snow to a bed. Freedom for a whistled call.

So, yes, sometimes a wild thing wants to be tamed.

And sometimes it sits by the fire so long, it forgets that there is any other way survive.

But no matter how sweetly the hunter whispers in the ear of the lion cub whose mother he just killed, there will come a time when that cub will become a lion itself. The danger that it will remember.

Even pigs who willingly feast on the slop of a farmer’s table know the call of the wild.

And if that same farmer who feeds them should fall into their pen, the wild in them claims as much right to the food of his flesh as he has to theirs.

Dom’s father was a farmer. And the man he’d hired was the one who slipped.

“The bastard used to touch me like I was the livestock,” Dom says, one of our nights by the fire. “And my father let him because he worked for cheap.” She looks off, ashamed when she says the rest. “I didn’t cry a tear when he died. But I cried for those pigs that had to eat him. My father killed them the next day and sold their meat somewhere far away.”

Ama takes her hand and spits into the dirt.

Somewhere nearby, Omisha sleeps in her cage.

We humans have made our own deals.

Bloodlust for civilization.

Possibility for security.

The devil out there for the devil in us.

By that same fire where Dom tells us about the pigs, Ama tells me my fortune. She lays out three little cards in a row and then flips them over one by one.

A tower. A king. A heart with three swords.

“That doesn’t look good,” I say, trying to make a joke.

But Ama’s eyes stay steady. Clear. Even in the dark. “What you own but cannot let go of, you do not possess. It possesses you.”

The smoke rises between us.

I’ve heard her say the same thing a dozen times to a dozen housewives looking to find relief from their boredom at a hanging.

She has several sayings like this one—ones that can mean anything and nothing at once.

And yet tonight it seems as if she is speaking only to me.

Then she laughs and flips the cards back over as she steals a smoke from out of Dom’s mouth. “Except, of course, your endless generosity, Dom. Don’t you never let go of that.”

Dom grins and then laughs too.

But I am not laughing.

I am thinking about the cards. The heart.

And in her cage, I hear Omisha stir. See the shadow of her powerful figure rise and realize that if she is going to be in any mood to work on our dance tonight, I still need to feed her.

Because everything, after all, is a trade.

A bargain.

And the most dangerous one of all is love.

17

A Winning Hand

Four Years Prior

Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum

The men’s eyes flick up from their conversations as we enter, skimming our bodies, deciding who they want. What they will do.

The ones sitting do not bother to stand. We are, after all, not real women.

We are defective. Disposable.

All the men are old—white hair and beards with spreading waistlines born of too much good food—except for one.

I recognize him immediately.

The man who killed my mother.

He sits wedged at the card table between two richly dressed men, with his black hair oiled like an expensive horse.

When he sees me, his silver eyes widen in surprise, and then he nods, addressing me by name the way he never would a proper lady. “Hello, Alice.”

My shadow wants to wrap her fingers around his neck. To squeeze the life out of his eyes the way his bullet took the life away from my mother.

But she is so very tired.

There is a brief pause in the conversation, the candles on the table spitting fat into the air. The superintendent watches me carefully. If there is any sign that I will cause trouble, I know that he will remove me and I will never be invited here again.

So I ignore my shadow and answer, the greeting sticking in my throat like a rotting bone. “Hello, sir.”

The men’s attention returns to their conversations, and I watch as a man with a drink-reddened nose pulls Sadie onto his lap, telling her that he’s a very important senator. She smiles and whispers something that makes him laugh, tossing his head back in a great, loud roar.

“Ladies.” The superintendent nods to those of us who remain standing. “Please take a seat. Our game is about to begin.”

The superintendent’s private quarters take up the entire top floor of the asylum. They present an ostentatious display of wealth, full of expensive wallpaper and matching fabric for the furniture.

Even the women my mother sewed for never had houses this grand.

I feel a wave of anger.

All of it paid for with money that should be going to help the locked-up women below.

Mary tells me that the superintendent also has a racetrack to which he invites his guests, and that it too is paid for with the money he makes from his patients.

“Something on your mind?” Before I can find a chair, an older man with sideburns turns to me with gentle eyes. He looks like he should be someone’s grandfather. And I feel a moment’s surety that everything is going to be all right.

I will get him to take me to the back room. Surely, he won’t hurt me.

And then he wraps his arm around my shoulder and, without so much of a thought as he might give to squeezing a fruit at the market, squeezes my breast.

I gasp.

“Quite ripe.” He nods, his kind eyes leering. “It’s a pity your mind is not so firm.”

I pull away, shuddering, then quickly realize my mistake.

But it’s too late. He’s seen the disgust in my eyes and moves on to another girl, leading her to the card table.

I am growing desperate. Most of the other girls have already been lured onto one man or another’s lap. And so I wedge myself between two gentlemen and watch as they deal in a hand of cards.

Across from me, I see Reginald watching. I try to ignore him.

On the table there is a silver pitcher, and when one of the girls lifts it to pour a drink, I see the reflection of the cards held by the man beside me. Sadie is in his lap, happily nibbling his ear, and every now and then he grunts with pleasure.

I watch one hand. Then two. The stakes grow higher. Each hand more and more money is laid at the center of the table.

And I notice something that brings me a bitter spark of joy—Reginald is losing.

With each round his stack of money grows lower, until at the end he takes off his gold watch and throws it in too.

“This is quite a pot, gentlemen. Quite a pot indeed.” The superintendent laughs. “Though not so large as our pockets will be, yes? Not after we go public with our steel.” My ears perk, and I make note of the name he says next.

Mary’s stock.

When he does, all the men cheer, and I lock it away in my mind.

Now all that is left is for me to find a way to the back room and write it down for Mary.

But it is no use. Of the six gentlemen, three already have a girl on their lap, and the fourth seemingly has no interest at all.

Which leaves only the superintendent and him.

I have no choice. I must get Reginald to take me to the back room.

But as I see his worried face, his watch in the table’s center, I know that unless he wins now, he won’t be in the mood for a woman at all.

In fact, I have not seen him look at anyone but me all night.

I wonder why he is here. Because I am a seamstress’s daughter, I notice the details that others do not. Reginald’s clothes, while expensive, have not been tailored for the current season, and their hems are well-worn. It is clear that though he carries himself like a gentleman, he does not have as much money as the other men. Perhaps he has helped them with favors from the law.

But when he removes his silver cuff links and throws them in too, I understand.

Reginald Salinger is not just a card player for fun. He is a habitual gambler.

And the way to get his attention is not with my body but by appealing to what he wants more than anything—to win.

And so I watch the silver teapot as it moves across the table. Its reflection. And when the last hand is between Reginald and the man who holds Sadie on his lap, I pick up the teapot and, ladylike, refill an empty glass, angling it slightly to show that Sadie’s man has nothing but a pair of twos. I glance at Reginald and I give the briefest shake of my head. He hesitates, eyes narrowing, before nodding imperceptibly back.

“I call,” Reginald says. And then he lays his cards down. Five pretty red diamonds in a row.

The table erupts in good-natured cheering and back-slapping, Sadie comforting the senator with another nibble at his ear. “Goddammit,” he mumbles amiably. But it is obvious that he is a rich man and, unlike Reginald, has more money to lose.

Reginald scoops his winnings up and then stands. “Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’d like to take a moment to celebrate.” He shoves the money into his pockets and holds his hand out to me. “Miss Springer. Would you care to join me for a refreshment?”

I stand. “I would like that very much.”

My heart is thudding in my chest as I follow him down a small hallway to a door that opens into the superintendent’s private library.

In it is a table full of hors d’oeuvres, a cheese plate, and countless bottles of liquor ringing a bucket of ice.

But it’s the door I care about. There, in the shadows, surrounded by velvet curtains, is a paned glass door just where Mary said it would be.

“Fix yourself a drink, darling,” Reginald says, throwing himself on a chaise next to the table. “And while you’re at it, fix me one too.”

Slowly, I go over to the refreshments table. My eyes catch on the cheese plate. Stuck into a wedge of cheddar is a surprisingly sharp knife. Turning my back more fully to Reginald so that he cannot see my hands, I pull it out and hide it in my dress pocket. Then I take a crystal goblet and pour it full of whiskey.

“Oh, damn,” Reginald says. “I forgot my watch. Wait here a moment.”

I can’t believe my luck. “Of course,” I say.

And then he gets up and walks out of the room.

It could not have been easier if I had planned it. I run to the door and twist the knob. It is unlocked, just as Mary promised.

The cool gust of winter air brushes against my cheek, and I shiver. Below me is the fire escape. And at its bottom I can just make out the pad of paper and pen that Mary has left for me to write down the name of her stock.

Run, my shadow tells me weakly. Hurry, Alice!

“Leaving so soon?” Reginald’s voice pulls me back into the room, and I spin around. He smiles, holding up his hands. “Don’t worry. I won’t stop you.”

My breath quickens in my chest, and I hold up the cheese knife. “Don’t come any closer.”

Reginald sits on the chaise and crosses his legs. “Of course not. But before you depart, let’s have a small chat.”

His voice threads out the offer smoothly, like a well-oiled spinning wheel. “You can go.” He nods toward the door, and the corner of his mouth twists into a smile as his eyes flick down to my hand. “I’ll even let you keep your cheese knife. It’s not very sharp, but I do believe it’s silver. Perhaps it will even get you enough money for a room for a night.”

I stiffen.

“But think about it, Alice. It’s freezing outside. You can run, but for how long?” He stops for a second, considering me. “And even if you run, do you think you’ll ever be able to outrun yourself?”

My shadow is flitting across the wall, trying valiantly to get my attention.

I ignore her.

“You’ve done bad things, Alice,” Reginald says. “No one is ever going to love you again. And no one should. A madwoman. A murderer.” His voice softens. “But me, I can offer you something better. I can keep you from sinning. I can give you a new life. Make you into a woman your mother would be proud of. Would you like that?”

I don’t answer.

“I can give you everything your mother wanted for you. A good life. A clean soul. Don’t you want that?”

Do I? In that second I don’t know.

“Wouldn’t your mother want that? To know that her girl was not just free but taken care of?”

“Yes,” I whisper.

“And don’t you want to give it to her? Doesn’t she deserve that, Alice? You’ve killed her, but don’t let her death be for nothing.”

I can’t speak. My shadow is trembling with fury.

Run! she screams. Run!

And that’s when I know what I must do. I might escape. Might even find a way to make a living out there. Tend bar. Mend clothes.

But I can never be free of her. My shadow.

Reginald’s right.

She’s killed before. Who’s to say she won’t kill again if there is no one to stop her?

And who better to stop a killer than the law?

I drop the knife. Turn to Reginald. “Tell me what to do.”

His smile broadens. “Marry me.”

—

After the party, I wait with the other women in the hall for the nurse to take us back to our sleeping quarters. I am to have one more night in the asylum, and then Reginald is to collect me in the morning.

Mary comes with the other women to clean up, and when she sees me, her eyes widen in surprise.

“It’s all right,” I tell her. “Reginald Salinger, that policeman, has offered to marry me.” Then I lean in and whisper the name of the stock.

Behind us, Sadie is drunk and singing her triumph with hissed glee.

“Slipped it in! And then he slipped it in!” She cackles, grabbing my arm and pulling me toward her. “Told you! Going to be a big fat one, it is. A nice big fat baby that I can leave beneath the stairs.”

I shiver, yanking my arm away.

“I thought you weren’t crazy!” Mary spins me back to face her. “Alice, what are you doing?”

“It’s going to be all right.” My voice sounds unnaturally bright. “Girls want to be married, don’t they?”

Mary shakes her head. “You’re not stupid, so don’t act like it. No good can come of this. Why is he finding his brides in an asylum? And why the hell are you saying yes?”

“You don’t understand.” I take a deep breath and, for the first and only time, speak the real reason I am doing this aloud. “This is what I deserve.”

Mary looks at me sadly. It’s more than I can take.

“What do you care?” I snarl the words. “I thought you weren’t my friend.”

“I’m not.” Our eyes lock. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t write me,” she says finally. “Wherever you’re going.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I’m the only other person who knows you’re alive. You let me know it stays that way.” She takes my hand and squeezes it tightly. “Be careful, Alice. And if you ever need it, I owe you an open door.”

18

Lost

Past

Somewhere

Here are the things I learned in my first year of marriage.

How to tell a salad fork from a dinner fork.

How to dip my fingers in rose water to clean them.

How to scream so that no one can hear me.

How to swallow a man’s kiss so that you do not feel it.

How to take without stealing.

How to die and still stay alive.

It is a shockingly simple thing for a man to claim an unwanted woman.

Reginald takes me straight from the asylum to the courthouse on Jefferson Street in Louisville, and there he marries me with two strangers off the street as witnesses. The couple are near to beggars themselves but stay just this side of the law by selling five-penny bread loaves on the street to drunks tumbling out of bars. The woman is only a few years older than Reginald, but her hard life and work have already lined her face. Strands of gray shoot through her hair, and she wears a garish silk flower on her stained dress. Her husband is bald and ageless, but he has a hard look in his eyes that says he’s seen things. I know the look well because I’ve seen things too.

After the wedding, Reginald takes me to a photographer’s studio, and the man makes me sit on a hard-backed chair for an hour while he holds gowns up to my face until Reginald finds one he likes—a childish outfit with a large bow at the collar. And when the man takes the picture and Reginald shows it to me, that’s exactly what I look like. A scared little girl stares out of the photograph as if she is trying to escape, all sharp elbows and knees and chin and cheekbones. I can see the country in me in that picture. The generations of women from the hills who passed down their strong faces and minds but who so often died young, like my mother.

It will be the same picture Reginald gives to the law when he is hunting me. Only then he will tell them my name is Belle King.

“I want you to always remember where you came from, Alice,” Reginald says when he takes the finished photograph and tucks it carefully into his pocket. “But I mean to transform you.”

And then he tells me why he really married me.

“My father is dying, but he’s being damned slow about it. And the bastard won’t give me my inheritance unless I’m married. You must become a lady who can dine and dance, but I don’t want you to ever forget you belong to me. I made you.” He leans down and plants a kiss on my forehead—our first. His lips are cold, shockingly so, and dry as frozen leaves. I shiver at their touch—it feels too much like some dead thing’s scaled claws scratching at my skin.

This is the man who killed your mother, my shadow says, or tries to say, but I cannot hear her anymore.

She is gone. I have lost her.

“You’re mine,” Reginald whispers, pulling away so that he can look at me. “You owe me your life now.”

After the photograph he books us a hotel room and leaves me, his sixteen-year-old bride, alone while he goes downstairs to drink and try his luck at the card table. “But be ready when I get back,” he says, and his smile does not reach his eyes. “I want us to get to know each other better.”

And for a few hours, I am free. I fondle the fine linens and soak in the room’s luxurious tub. No more cold showers with forty other women. No more sleeping in flea-ridden cots.

And yet I have never felt less free.

Reginald returns all too soon. I don’t know how much he has drunk, but the gray of his eyes has all but disappeared, swallowed by endless black holes.

“Put this on.”

I expect his speech to be slurred, but it is horribly clear as he tosses something onto our wedding bed. It takes me a moment to realize what it is. A woman’s dress. But not a new one. This dress is so filthy that I think he must be joking. I start to laugh.

Then I see his eyes again. Those cold black holes.

And so, trembling, I obey.

I wish, now, that I could reach through time and speak to the girl in that room. Forbid her to do it. Comfort her. But I cannot. I can only watch from behind closed eyes in this jail cell as she puts on that dress.

It is the dress from the woman on the street who sold bread. The one who signed our marriage certificate. I know it because of the large silk flower pinned to its breast. It looks wilted now, if a dead thing can lose a life it never possessed.

Slowly, I slip the filthy garment over my clean skin. It smells of unwashed body and the yeast of baking bread mixed with the smoke of some long-gone cigar.

But that is not the worst. On the corner of the dress’s collar is a spot of blood, newly drying.

I try to convince myself that it is something else, but I can smell that too. The iron richness of a new penny.

Maybe she cut her finger with a bread knife.

Or maybe Reginald paid to make her bleed.

Or maybe he didn’t have to pay at all. He is, after all, a cop.

I turn my head away and gag.

And then Reginald throws me down on the bed and tries to claim me.

But he cannot.

It is the one saving grace of our marriage. No matter how hard he tries, Reginald cannot make love to me. To anyone.

So he does other things. Brings himself pleasure with my pain.

Sometimes I think that the only way he might be able to do with me what he wants is if he killed me first.

I think someday, maybe, he will.

And so to make myself indispensable, I become very good at gambling.

With my help at the table, Reginald stops working as a police officer and spends his nights playing cards. His family name buys his way into houses and gaming tables that would not otherwise have him. And to each one of them, he brings me. His lucky charm.

I learn quickly. I know that each mistake I make at the table will be a mistake I’ll pay for later.

No one suspects me because I am just a girl. Reginald’s young bride. I sit at his side like a prize and laugh at all the men’s jokes. But really, I am finding ways to make sure he wins. Reflections in beer bottles, counting cards without seeming like I’m paying attention at all, leaving to “take some air” and taking in each player’s hand instead as I exit. I learn all the rules of all the games. When Reginald runs out of houses in which he is welcome on this side of the ocean because he is winning too frequently, he brings me all the way to Europe.

I learn the rules there too.

There is a power in unbecoming. When one can no longer feel, one can no longer be hurt.

Not by Reginald’s knife.

Or his words.

The hundreds of slights a day he makes to my person.

I feel none of them. Instead, I disappear entirely into a cocoon of apathy. Alice is no longer there. Alice is unbecoming.

Each dinner party we attend, Reginald watches me for anything that will embarrass him as the gentleman he so badly wants to be. Which fork will I pick up for each course, the right one or the wrong one? How much wine will I take? To whom will I speak and who will I ignore?

I make myself into the perfect woman by stitching together pieces of all the women I see.

I learn how to take such small bites of my food that my mouth hardly moves when I chew.

I learn how to blush when a man says my name.

And all the while, I take.

You can’t steal what’s free, Alice.

Mary’s words and my letters to her keep me alive. They aren’t much, but each month I send her another.

I am alive.

And each month, now from a new address in California, she writes back.

I still owe you that door. I own several now, Alice. Come see me. Take your pick.

I can’t go to her. I am afraid of what I would do with my freedom. But her words are a reason, however small, to go on.

I find that Reginald can be played in exactly the same way I play a hand of poker. There are gambles worth taking, ways to prolong or suspend or even, on occasion, prevent the pain.

It is all a matter of how much I am willing to risk.

Each time he comes back with a new girl’s old dress, I close my eyes and try to imagine her. Who, exactly, it is he wanted me to become.

The finer the dress, the cruder the experience he expects.

So on those nights, I put on the fancy gown, close my eyes, and whisper the filthiest things I can imagine in his ear.

On those nights when his knife slices its tiny cuts across my skin, I must pretend to enjoy it. To beg for the pain.

It is the only way to make it stop.

A man does not like to hurt a woman when she claims the hurt as her own. He wants it to be something he can give her that she does not have.

A lack.

But what Reginald does not know, can never understand, is that I already have all the pain in the world.

Over and over again, he tells me that I deserve everything he does to me. That this is what a girl gets who killed her own mother.

And most nights I believe him.

But sometimes, still, she is there. My shadow. Whispering to me that I should take the knife and slice his throat.

And then, one night, Reginald receives his own letter.

“My father’s dying,” he tells me, holding the envelope to his breast more tenderly than he has ever held me. “The old bastard’s lasted longer than anyone ever could have thought, but he doesn’t have long now.” He smiles. “My sister says it’s time to go home.”

I shiver.

Because though he doesn’t say it, I know what the letter really means.

Once Reginald Salinger collects his inheritance, he won’t need me anymore.

19

Missing

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

I wake well rested and eager for the news that I will hang.

I have prepared for the occasion, cleaning myself as best as I can with the small bowl of water they allow me in my cell and shooing away the ever-present ravens from the bars in my window.

I even wear a beatific smile. Welcoming. Nonthreatening. Kind.

Well, perhaps not kind but sincere. The sheriff and I do, after all, share a common interest.

Despite my husband’s meddling, there will be no more impediments to my trial and conviction. Not after the policemen in Deadwood and Abilene find the bodies I gave them.

And if my fool husband is here to see my face as Hicks announces the news, all the better.

Finally, I hear footsteps descending the stairs, and I cross my hands and wait.

I listen for the specific clunking gait of Hicks and his lifted boots. Yes, there it is, the sound more hollow, more careful on the steps as he seeks to find balance. On his heels is the limping gait of the old jailer, Brownie, unmistakable in its uneven rhythm. And behind that is another set of footsteps, sure and confident.

My husband.

I move toward the bars, eager to greet them.

And stop.

Because there is a fourth set of steps.

Daintier. Lighter. The soles crafted of soft leather.

I freeze, ear cocked. Perhaps they’ve brought an onlooker. Some wealthy visitor who has offered the sheriff money to see me.

Or—and my heart speeds at the thought—the judge. I could not see his shoes at the hearing, but such a man would certainly wear something fine, dress shoes with soft leather soles, no cowboy boots for him.

The steps grow closer. Yes, I’m sure of it now. It’s the judge come to tell me that the bodies have been found just where I said they would be. That I am now nothing more than the walking dead.

There is the glow of a bobbing lantern and then the flare of the gaslights so that the basement jail goes from a dim gray to a flickering cave of shadows.

“Hello, Belle.” It’s the sheriff first, and he looks more sure of himself than I’ve ever seen him. He does not wear it well, his certainty. It is a smugness that twists his already-unfortunate face into a sneer. His poor mustache looks like it’s trying to crawl into his nose.

“Mr. Hicks.” I cannot stop myself from smiling. Soon enough I will be rid of this man for good.

And then Hicks steps closer, and I see that I have mistaken his expression.

It is not smugness; it is anger. And he has made it a point to get down the steps as quickly as possible ahead of the others so that he can speak to me privately.

The very fact that he dares to do this—to get this close to the bars of my cell when I have so nearly killed him twice—sets off a tingling of alarm.

“Did you find them?” I ask. “Bernhard Price and Cornelius Carnegie. Do the police have their bodies?”

He spits—actually spits—past me and into my cell. “No,” he says. “There weren’t no bodies, you lying she-devil. There weren’t nothing there at all. You’ve completely embarrassed me.”

I speak to him like a teacher to an especially dull pupil.

“I told you there wouldn’t be any diamonds. Those have been…claimed. But a body is all you need.” You greedy bastard, I think but don’t say. “You were to have the local law forces unbury those, identify the corpses, and send word. Have you done that?”

Another figure appears. Brownie, with his jangling keys and limping gait.

“There weren’t no bodies,” Hicks says again, stubbornly, and now I am furious.

Behind Brownie comes the shadow of my husband.

“You incompetent fool,” I whisper, grabbing Hicks’s shirt and pulling him toward me, slamming his face against the bars. “I told you exactly where to dig. How could you mess that up?”

He sinks into them, and I see that he is enjoying this far more than he should. My touch, the cold press of the protective bars on his face. He will make a story of it later.

I let go of his unwashed shirt collar, suddenly disgusted. “I gave you one thing to do, and you can’t even accomplish that.” I wipe away the filth of him on my dress. “Well, we shall just have to try it again. Once a fool, twice a lucky man, perhaps. Send a telegram and tell them exactly what I say this time. Let’s start with New Mexico first. A large cliff, near the river—”

“There weren’t no body!” Hicks’s voice rises. “Not in Las Vegas and not in Abilene.” He is yelling—actually yelling at me. “I’m starting to think your husband is right. You ain’t never killed nobody before in your life!”

My husband’s smiling face meets my gaze over the sheriff’s shoulder. “Good morning, Alice.” He tips his head in a gentleman’s greeting. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

He steps aside, and the owner of the dainty footsteps is revealed.

Not the judge. My heart sinks.

Not even a man.

Looking unsure and a little dazed, a woman tentatively steps forward. My husband takes her arm and leads her closer to my cell.

“My dear.” He speaks as if he is standing in someone’s drawing room instead of on the cold stone floor of a jail in the most unlawful part of the country. “This is Rebecca. Rebecca, I’d like you to meet my wife, Alice Springer.”

The woman, God bless her, actually curtsies.

“What do you think you’re doing?” My voice is a furious whisper.

“Now, don’t be rude.” He pulls the woman nearer. She, like every other woman he’s ever met, comes willingly. Charmed by him. “This is Rebecca Carnegie. Perhaps you recognize her?”

I don’t recognize her face, but I do recognize the two diamonds sparkling in her ears.

They are the same ones I’d buried in her husband’s body when I replaced his heart.

“You moved them,” I say, understanding. My husband smiles. “You moved the bodies.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice is maddeningly calm. “My love. It’s just like the sheriff says. There was no body. The law forces dug exactly where you told them to.”

“But you dug there first.” I can’t stop a furious tear from springing to my eye.

The poor woman steps forward. And whether she has not heard all the stories about me or does not care, she lays a hand over mine through the bars.

“Don’t worry, honey,” she says kindly. “I know you’re innocent. My husband always was a runaround. I don’t know where he got off to, but I’m sure he’ll show up eventually.” She turns her head to flash the diamonds. “I got these in the mail a few days ago with a letter from him saying not to worry and that he was fine.”

“That letter could not possibly have been from your husband,” I say.

The woman shrugs. “Well, he never was much of a writer, but the important thing is he sent me these.” She tilts her head again. “They’re family heirlooms, and they weren’t ever his to take.”

“There.” My husband smiles at me. “You see? No bodies, and this woman even has her jewels. Which means that good old Cornelius must be alive and kicking.”

“Stop.” I glare at him. “You know as well as I do that that man never sent his wife those diamonds.”

“I only know one thing, Alice.” His jaw tightens, and each word he releases next is a staccato piercing of my heart. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get you back.”

20

Heartbeat

Past

Somewhere

My husband leaves, gloating that this prison I’ve thrown myself into will soon be forced to release me, and I can only rage.

In the quiet of my cell, I stop my breath and try to catch a memory.

It is impossible.

Our heartbeats are a cage for time.

And a memory is the space between.

You can never hold a real one, only remake it with pieces that crumble more each time they are touched.

And yet I try.

And for a moment, I catch the tail of something true.

“We have to keep her safe, Alice.” Cal squeezes my hand.

We are twisted up together beneath the stars, Cal with his head on my shoulder. I am unused to holding a boy. To knowing one who wants to be held. He runs a finger up my spine and circles my shoulder blade. He says it is his favorite part—sturdy but delicate. Capable of holding all the weight in the world.

Even, he jokes, my wings.

“Hmmm?” I mumble.

“Omisha. I brought her to this camp, so she’s my responsibility.” Cal kicks off the camp blanket covering us and stretches out his long cowboy legs, and for a second I am distracted. You have never lived until you’ve had a cowboy’s legs wrapped around your waist. But his next words bring me back. “Do you know what happens to tigers who grew up in captivity and then are set free?”

I know from Ama, who has stolen a book about tigers, that a tiger is not born knowing how to hunt.

It must learn to kill from its mother.

The cub watches her bring down her prey over and over again. Devour beasts that are swifter. Stronger. More cunning.

That run in a herd so large that for miles the ground disappears beneath their feet.

And yet still the tiger triumphs.

Her cub studies her movements. Her speed. Her bloodlust.

It practices killing in its dreams.

Until, one day, the cub becomes a hunter too.

But what if a tiger does not have a mother to teach it? If it is born in a cage and then you let it go?

“It starves.” Cal shakes his head as he tells me this. He holds my face in his hands. Kisses my nose. My lips. My cheeks.

My tears.

But I wonder. What if a tiger doesn’t need its mother to teach it to hunt?

What if a tiger can teach herself?

In the meantime, we agree to keep her safe. Keep her fed.

Cash crafts her a cage with wood and steel and beauty.

Dom keeps her company with music and jokes while the Russian brothers toss her a ball.

And Ama reads to us from her stolen book.

It tells us what they need to survive. How they live and breed and hunt.

And Cal—who, unlike Ama or Dom or me or even the delicate Cash, can walk into any town without fear of a predator—Cal orchestrates it all.

His silver tongue barters for the wood, the brightest steel, and wheels from a mining cart that are strong enough to travel over rough prairie.

He even paints the bars of Omisha’s cage gold.

But it is still a cage.

And so I ask Cash to add one small thing.

“Give her a sky,” I say. “Please. On the ceiling of her cage.”

Because I don’t mean to keep Omisha locked away forever. I want her to remember what it feels like to be free.

“I can try.” His serious eyes bore into mine. “But animals aren’t like us, Alice. They always know what is real and what is fake.”

“Even so,” I say, “I’d like you to try.”

So he does. I had expected blue paint. A few clouds. But when he is finished, Cash shows me a sunset so beautiful I feel like I can almost plunge my hand through the top of the cage and into the deep pink. I cry. Cash does not ask me why, though there is something in the way he takes my hand that tells me he understands.

He is not like the others in the Damned. Cash, with his unusual eyes, one green and one brown, is harder to know but easier to trust. If he does something for you, it is because he wants to. It is because he cares. And Cash has his own secrets. There are nights I’ve seen him steal away from camp in one of Ama’s dresses with crushed berry on his lip. Others I’ve watched him pull two working girls from their place at the bar and lead them upstairs for the price of a poem.

In that one shivering space between heartbeats, I know that this at least for sure is true—I can try to give her a sky.

And even now, knowing what its false beauty will cost, I would do it again.

Because even if it is a lie, I need Omisha to know that I want it to be true.

That, if I could, I would give her back to the world she had before she knew what cages meant.

21

Inheritance

Two Years Prior

Atlanta, Georgia

In Atlanta, Reginald finds me a new cage.

It is our second day in his father’s home.

It is the first day he’s locked the door.

“Let me out!” I pound my palm on wood thick as a man’s fist.

The door is the only way out of the attic room where he is keeping me. The space was once a nursery, and the windows have tightly latticed iron bars too narrow for a child to fall through.

Too narrow for a woman to escape.

“You have no right to keep me here.” I slam my hand against the door again, and this time I feel a bruise forming on its heel. If I’m not careful, I won’t be able to use it come morning.

“As your husband, I have every right.” Reginald’s voice on the other side is perfectly calm. “More than that, I have a responsibility. In fact, I’ve called the family doctor.”

A cold chill wrings my neck, squeezing away my breath like an icy hand. “Why?”

“You’re not yourself, Alice,” he says softly, and I hear a murmur from another voice that I know to be his sister’s. Her name is Lucretia, and though she is a woman and four years his senior, their faces are like enough to be twins. They are two vultures circling the house, waiting for their father to die.

“Please.” I hate myself for it, but I am going to have to beg. “I’ll do anything you want, Reginald. Let me come sleep in your bedroom tonight. Keep you warm. You can…use the candle.”

I don’t say the knife, but I will. Dear God, by the end of it I’ll beg him to use it just so that I can feel.

“Good night, sweet wife.” And then there is the horribly final sound of his boots on the stairs as he descends to the floors below where he cannot hear me at all.

Even if I scream.

And I do. Over and over again, until my throat is raw. Until my eyes are red and bulging and my hand is not just bruised but bloodied by its pounding on the door.

But that comes later.

First, I let myself believe that there is a way out.

It is only a room, after all. A room where children used to play. It is long and narrow, with the windows facing the north, so that the light is weak and watery. The floors are scuffed oak, and the walls are covered entirely in wallpaper, in a pattern that must once have been cheery.

It is a forest of trees and birds that endlessly repeats. The color is Scheele’s green, an unnatural emerald that does not allow the eye to rest. And the forest’s trees have begun to fade and peel, as if their bark is shedding. The birds hover in midflight, their wings losing particles of paper like feathers. So that the mottled creatures seem to be in their death throes, gliding over a decaying forest.

I walk the room again and again, tracing my finger along the walls.

It takes five hundred and thirteen steps to complete a circle.

A thousand and twenty-six to complete two. I can walk the room a dozen times in the minutes between the first gray leaking of dusk and full dark.

I can walk it a hundred times before the sun comes up.

In the morning, there is a knock at the door, and I spring up from the corner where I’ve found myself crouching—asleep? awake?—and rush to answer.

Lucretia stands there, a tray in her hands. “May I come in?”

I greedily eye the open door behind her. I should run. Shove her away and hurl myself down the stairs. But she looks so calm. Her eyes, so kind. “Hello,” she says, setting the tray on the small table beside the bed. “I’ve brought you a cup of tea.” Her voice grows suddenly shy. “The doctor will be here in a few minutes, but I thought we could talk first.”

The door. I should run for the door, but then perhaps I’m overreacting. The truth is, I have not felt well since Reginald brought me to this house, its towering columns like bones rising from the Atlanta streets. And my throat is parched.

“Thank you,” I say, sitting on the bed because there is nowhere else to sit.

Outside, it is late afternoon and raining, and in the gray light I can see Lucretia’s face more clearly than that first hectic night when we arrived.

Then, when it was lit by the wavering flames of gas lamps, I’d thought her alike enough to be Reginald’s twin. Now I see that there are lines around her mouth and eyes that mark her as older. And there above her lip is a large brown mole. Its raised presence is so stark that I wonder how I could have missed it before.

She catches me staring, and I look away.

“Here,” she says, pouring the contents of the delicate silver teapot into a china cup laced with pink flowers. “Have a cup of tea.”

Steam rises from the cup, and I watch as Lucretia pulls a honey spoon from a glass pot and stirs it into the drink before handing it to me.

I take it, inhaling the sweet and earthy smell.

“It’s bohea,” Lucretia says, smiling. “My favorite. My grandmother used to drink it when we’d visit her in London.”

I take a sip, and the liquid warms a syrupy trail down my throat, soothing its rawness. “Thank you,” I manage. “Truly, I don’t need a doctor. A walk would do me good, though.” I smile, trying very hard to make her see just how well I am. “Perhaps we could go together?”

“That would be lovely,” she says brightly. “We have a beautiful garden in the back, and there is a public rose park just across the street, though of course it’s not in bloom now.”

I take another drink.

“Better?” Lucretia asks.

I nod. “I’m sorry about your father,” I say, feeling a rush of sympathy for this woman who is being so kind. “I know what it is like to lose a parent.”

“Yes.” She sighs. “Thank you.” She hesitates as if debating whether to say more and finally speaks. “I know you think it cruel to keep you up here, but Reginald truly was worried. He told me about your earlier troubles.”

“Troubles?” The word comes out slow and thick as the honey that she’s stirred into my drink.

“The loss of your mother. He said after her death your nerves were bad and you had to be kept under supervision so that you wouldn’t hurt yourself.”

No, I say or try to say, but my tongue is suddenly inexplicably heavy. No, that’s not the way it was at all.

“There’s no shame in it,” Lucretia says brightly. “My mother had a nervous constitution as well. She stayed up here, and so did…” But her words trail off.

“Who?” I ask, and it sounds like one of the birds in the wallpaper is speaking. Who? Who?

Lucretia gently unwraps my hand from the teacup. I let her.

“Here, dear. Lie down. You look tired.”

And because I am already sitting on the bed, I do.

“I’ll just sit with you until the doctor comes.”

In the gloaming, her shadow looms so large that it swallows her whole. Only the outline of her face, its dark mole jutting out from her lip, is visible.

It is so easy to sink down into the sweet deliciousness of sleep.

So very, very easy.

My eyes dart to the door. The cup. The door.

And then I know.

She has slipped something into the drink. And if I fall asleep, the doctor will find me here, not sick but drugged.

And he will not know the difference.

“No!” The anger bubbles white hot to my lips, forcing out the word like a boiling pot spilling its lid. “No!” I thrash in the bed, trying oh-so hard to sit up, and then I feel the cool fingers of Lucretia’s hand over my wrist. And then she pulls something from the floor.

It is a chain, looped through an iron hold in the floor. I feel the cool oiliness of its metal replace Lucretia’s hand on my skin.

“Not long now,” she says, her words as bright and light as a song.

On the walls behind her, the forest is moving. The bird not a bird at all but a skeleton of rotting flesh.

“Hello.” A man with a black bag appears at the door.

“Hello,” the birds on the wall say.

Lucretia stands and lets the man move closer. “She’s been clean out of her mind,” Lucretia says. “Reginald thinks it’s the stress. A new marriage. The move here.”

“That can certainly do it,” the man says, and now he is over my bed and pulling something from his bag. When he leans over, I see the sparkle of blue eyes. He looks kind. Like somebody’s father. “Are you all right, child?”

Once again, the birds are talking.

My tongue is thick. I try to sit up. To point. “The teacup!” I say or think I say. “The teacup. Please!”

His eyes soften, and he lays a tender hand across my brow. “Shh, child. It’s all right now. I understand.”

I sink back against the bed, all my effort spent. He understands. He will let me out of here. Help me be free.

But when he turns around, there is something in his hand. He speaks not to me but to Lucretia. “She’s very like her, isn’t she? Reginald certainly has an affection for wounded birds.”

“Very alike,” Lucretia agrees. “Reginald always did enjoy keeping pretty things, even when they were broken.”

The doctor bends over me.

In his hand a needle gleams in the darkness, catching the light of a lamp that someone has lit.

And then I feel a sting in my arm. “Shh…” the doctor says again. “It’s time to sleep.”

I do.

But my shadow doesn’t.

She circles the wallpapered room without resting.

She peels the paper from the walls, one painful strip at a time.

Claws at it with my fingernails until they leave bloody traces on the walls.

The paper curls onto the floor, its piles of deadly green like a snake’s shed skin.

On the third sunrise we find it. Three words carved into the wall, just above the bed.

CLARA WAS HERE

22

Thirst

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

The jail provides its prisoners with chicory coffee instead of tea. I know this because Hicks dumps my cup out in front of me, letting the grounds pool onto the floor.

“How do you like that, you lying hellcat!” He spits into the puddle as if I might still want to crawl out and drink it.

But I won’t. I won’t drink something just because someone tells me to ever again.

“I like it quite well,” I say calmly. “You’ve gone to all the work to make it, and now you’ll have to clean it up.”

He spits into it once more, as if to prove me wrong, and then shuffles back upstairs, leaving his mess behind.

I stare into the puddle.

In the asylum we were only allotted one tablespoon of tea for each meal. One tablespoon of leaves scooped into a single strainer for a dozen girls. We passed it down the line and dunked it in our cups over and over again.

But first the superintendent used it, letting it steep in his cup for a full five minutes. Finished, he’d pass the silver cage to the girl on his right. One dunk. Two. Three if he was in a good mood. Then on down the line it went.

By the end of the table there was nothing in our cups but stained water.

Only when I met Cal did I realize just how thirsty I really was.

I knew it the second he held his hand out to me over the bloodied body of my husband.

The moment he asked me to run.

I have had water spilled on the floor.

Licked up the bits of the broken china with my tongue.

Swallowed my own blood.

I’ve known a man who called this love.

And I bore it because I did not know anything else existed.

But when I met Cal, everything changed—and now I want that first cup.

Not the one at the end of the table.

Not even the asylum director’s cup.

I want the cup that I make in my own kitchen with my own hands.

I want to know what it tastes like.

I want to boil the water and steep the leaves and take it as strong or as weak as I like.

I want it to scald or soothe my throat, at my command.

I just want to drink it whenever I want.

Whenever I want.

Whenever I want.

Whenever…

23

Found

Two Years Prior

Atlanta, Georgia

“Who,” I manage to ask one morning before Lucretia can give me the tea, “is Clara?”

The wallpaper owls in the trees call back my question. “Who? Who?”

Lucretia smiles, staring at the name above me on the wall and the pile of paper beneath. “You’ve made quite a mess, haven’t you?”

She waits until I take a sip of tea.

“Reginald’s childhood sweetheart,” she says finally. “His first wife.”

The tea becomes a worm in my throat, choking me. I cough into the cup.

“Poor thing went mad,” Lucretia says, ignoring my distress. “Tried to claw her way out. Reginald said it was better to keep her up here. Give her medicine.”

“And you helped him?” I can understand it of him. Or if not understand it, fathom the sickness in his mind that allows it. The lust for control. For power over things he cannot otherwise have. But her? She is a woman, like me. Like Clara. How could she have let him do such a cruel thing to someone who, in another home, might well be her?

For an instant, I see the spark of something like shame light her face as she studies me, but her eyes dart away. “You’re the one who married him,” she says. “Not me.”

“But I didn’t know I was marrying this!” I say. “Clara couldn’t have known either.”

“Clara.” She says the name disdainfully. “That girl thought she was in love.”

“Wasn’t she?”

There, again, that inscrutable look on her face. “Love is not flowers and chocolates,” she says. “Love is being willing to do what needs to be done to make someone else happy.”

Her gaze wanders to the single painting in the room. A family portrait hanging on the far wall above a boarded-up fireplace. The rendering is of a dour mother and scowling father, his two children cowering beneath him, hands clasped tightly, and finally I understand.

Lucretia is no longer speaking of Clara. She is speaking of herself. Of Reginald.

“You love him,” I say, the worm curling again in my throat. “Even though he’s a monster, you love him.”

If she weren’t also helping him kill me, I might be touched.

“You don’t know anything about him,” she says, her beady eyes bright. “What he went through. What we went through. My father was a man who did unspeakable things.”

“That does not give you or your brother a right to do them too,” I say quietly. Thinking of the past has agitated her, and her hands grasp at her dress, pinching and pulling.

“Drink your tea,” she says finally. And God help me, I do.

—

On a day where the attic windows are covered with late-winter rain, the door opens. At first I think it is Lucretia. She has just been in, but perhaps she forgot something.

Then I hear Reginald’s heavy footsteps and smell the liquor on his breath as he sits down on the bed beside me.

“My father is dead.”

I have not seen Reginald in weeks.

If he leaves now, I know that I will never get out.

And so I try, with everything inside of me, to hold on to my fury. My shadow keeps it for me, hidden there in what’s left of the wallpaper forest. Keeps it burning between the branches of the peeling trees.

“I’m going tomorrow,” he says. “You can come with me.” He lays a hand on my arm. I flinch. Rather, the Alice who is hidden inside of me flinches, though my body stays perfectly still. “Or you could stay.”

I know what he really means. If I stay, they will keep me in this wallpapered room forever. Like his father kept his mother. Like he kept Clara.

And the worst thing is, a part of me wants it. A part of me has begun to crave Lucretia’s inky tea.

“Want. Go,” I manage, the word feeling foreign in my mouth. She makes me say it. My shadow. She has been whispering to me at night.

Now that she is out of the forest, she wants out of this room.

“You will have to be good,” he says, as if speaking to a child. “No more tantrums. No more trying to run away.”

I shake my head. No. Then yes. I will not try to run away. I will be good. Just give me the tea and let me disappear back into the forest.

“We’re going to build a city, Alice,” Reginald whispers eagerly, as if we are in the habit of confiding things in each other. As if I really am his partner and loving wife. “In Texas, where the railroad is coming. We’ll control everything there that people need. The food, the water, the liquor.” He squeezes my arm so hard that I see little red welts rise to the surface. He smiles. “The law. My father’s connections have gotten me the job of federal marshal there. More of a title than a job, really. A possibility. I’m going to have my own goddamn empire. And if you’re very good, I’ll let you help me.”

And if you don’t, I’ll kill you, he doesn’t say but doesn’t need to.

First Clara. Then me. He will lock me up in this little room until I die from the captivity or, worse, my mind dies and my body stays alive.

Perhaps I would be brave enough to end it.

Then again, perhaps I wouldn’t.

When we leave, his sister watches us from a window with hateful eyes, and I know she wishes it were her.

But it is not. It is me.

And I have a secret.

Because when I leave, I am not alone.

When I leave, my shadow comes with me.

24

Sunday Prayers

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

I am done waiting for men to decide my fate.

I have stayed up all night thinking things through, and because it is a Sunday, I think it only fair to include the Lord in my plans.

Hicks arrives just before noon, but already the limekiln is blistering.

The morning is scorching, just as I’d hoped it would be. Smiling, I begin to hum a Sunday hymn in thanks. Viktor Crane was a very religious man, and I sang this particular one to him just before he died.

“Be quiet, you she-devil.” The sheriff, apparently no music lover, bangs his gun on the bars of my cage to shut me up before swinging it open. He steps fully inside without a single second’s hesitation. Which tells me all I need to know about how he sees me now. “You look different,” he mutters.

“Yes,” I say. “I slept very well. I’m eager to be going home.” It is my hair. I have pinned it on top of my head in a twist.

But men never do notice such things.

The sheriff snorts. “And I’m eager for you to be some other man’s problem.”

I am no longer something to be feared. In the space of a few hours I have become simply another woman. But he is still not taking any chances. He laces the handcuffs on my wrists as tightly as they have ever been.

Smiling, I oblige the sheriff with silence as he leads me up the stairs. We do not stop on the first floor but continue, as I hoped we would, to the second. The sheriff wipes a bead of sweat from his brow with the back of his free hand.

“A lovely day!” I say brightly. The sheriff doesn’t bother to respond.

The entire building is quiet. The judge wants to meet us without a crowd, and today is the one day we can do so. The streets are also strangely quiet except for the ring of a church bell, which strikes twice for half past the eleven o’clock hour.

Even sinners, it seems, want to be forgiven. The town and its visitors have either packed themselves into houses of worship or are somewhere dark sleeping off last night’s drink.

Either way, we are alone. The sheriff’s booted heels clack loudly on the floor.

My feet don’t make a sound. Then again, they never did, not even when I wore those horrid heels so in fashion in Paris.

“Be glad to be done with you,” the sheriff mumbles, shoving his sad little gun into my back. “And don’t try to tell me no more lies about that goddamn Queen’s Ransom. Wherever it is, you sure as hell don’t know nothing about it.”

“Now, Sheriff. I know that I am causing you to work on a Sunday, but that is no reason to talk to a lady in such a fashion. It is the Lord’s day, after all. Our mouths and hearts should be full of their own diamonds.”

“Shut up,” he says, and shoves the gun beneath my ribs harder.

At least sweet old Brownie is not here to deal with the man’s poor mood. Or his nearly unbearable stench. Despite what I said about church and the Lord, that is certainly not where this man would have been had he not been called in to work. No, he would have crawled into some hole with the other animals who made themselves too sick on poison last night to face the day. He was sulking, no doubt. Drinking away the fact that the famous outlaw who was supposed to have made his reputation as a notorious gunslinger of the Wild West is, instead, apparently nothing more than a sad housewife who never killed a man in her life.

Who won’t even give him his precious diamond.

“I am sorry, Sheriff,” I say. We have arrived finally at what I assume is the judge’s chamber, and Hicks is trying without success to make himself more presentable. Licking his forefinger, he runs it over each unruly eyebrow and then licks it again, tugging at his ugly mustache. Now the dead thing across his lips looks like it has fallen into a river.

“I will make it up to you,” I continue.

“Make what up to me?” He doesn’t bother to look at me as he knocks.

“Your reputation. I know that you were counting on my hanging. But I promise you won’t be forgotten.”

He grumbles something under his breath, but I only catch the words “liar” and “bitch.” The man is not creative.

From behind the closed door I hear the scrape of a chair against the floor and then the huff of a man rising to his feet.

“Hicks?” I say his name sweetly, letting it drip from my mouth as though it is coated in honey. Finally, he turns.

“What?”

His red eyes don’t just look hungover, they look defeated. And I realize then just how much of this case’s blunder will fall on him. How much of a laughingstock he has likely already become. “You poor, poor man,” I say. And mean it. Lifting my hand, I lay it on his stubbled cheek. He flinches, but as starved for tenderness as he is, he does not pull away. In fact, I hear the smallest sniffle swallowed quickly back down his throat. “It isn’t fair, is it? You’ve done so much. Worked so hard.”

“I have,” he mumbles. “Nobody never thought I could be sheriff.”

“But here you are. You’ll always have that, won’t you? The joy of proving them wrong?”

For a moment, he loses himself in my gaze, and then I take my hand away and he shivers, like a man coming out of a trance.

The judge calls from behind the door, “Come in!”

Hicks looks embarrassed, and to compensate, he opens the door and shoves me roughly inside.

To his credit, the judge bows slightly to me. “Miss Springer. How are you on this fine morning? Ready to go home?”

“I believe home is an internal state, don’t you?”

He looks at me as if I’m mad, which, according to the signed documents in front of him, he has clearly decided I am.

“Yes,” he says. “Home is indeed a state of grace. And it can also be another person.” His eyes grow misty. “I don’t know what I would do without my wife, Millie. You’re lucky to have a man like Reginald who loves you. Who will keep you in sickness and health.”

“So lucky,” I say. But I am hardly listening. I am looking over his shoulder to the tall window, free from bars because it is on the second story, and big enough for a man to stand in and cool himself in the breeze. It is open, just as I hoped it would be.

The judge’s voice grows serious. “In fact, Reginald should be here any moment now, but I wanted to make sure we had these few moments alone so that you understand the gravitas of what that man is doing for you. The sacrifice he’s making to take care of you.”

“I certainly do, Your Honor.” I make my voice light, fighting the urge to glance toward the door. “But before you release me back into my husband’s care, would you be so kind as to let me read your final statement for the court? I know I’m just a silly girl, but it seems only right I see it even if I don’t fully understand.” I smile. “Besides, I’ve heard that you have a reputation for your writing. Harvard-trained, aren’t you?” I drop the tidbits from the paper like blessings on his eager head.

“I am.” The judge preens, puffing out his chest. “Thought Dodge City could do with a little civilization, and it has been my honor to provide it.”

Hicks has no choice but to move with me toward the judge’s desk; holding tight to my handcuffs as he is, we are as good as bound together, he and I.

I pick up the papers, squinting. “A little more toward the light, if you please, Sheriff.”

Grudgingly, we move to stand in front of the window.

I wait, pretending to read. Soon, now. “Would you mind taking off the cuffs, Sheriff? It would be ever so much easier to read, and besides, I’m a free woman now.”

Hicks hesitates, but the judge nods his permission. “Go on. She won’t need them where she’s going.”

The sheriff gives me a final, withering stare as he removes them, and I am pleased to see that there is still the smallest spark of fear there after all.

Perhaps he has learned his lesson. Or at least begun to.

Sighing with the release, I rub my wrists.

And then it begins. The church bell rings noon and the doors open. The Sunday crowd spills into the streets, the priest leading them into the sunny day.

I hold the paper to the light, and as I do so, I reach up to slip out the thing I’ve hidden in my twisted-up hair. Freed, my hair tumbles down to my shoulders.

“Come here, Sheriff,” I whisper. “See all these people who love you.”

A few faces are already beginning to look up, no doubt telling one another that this is where the notorious Seamstress is being kept.

When they see the sheriff standing at the window with a woman, it is not long before everyone is staring at us, pointing with excitement.

“Miss Springer.” The judge’s voice has grown serious. “Please come back over here. I don’t want the good folks outside getting agitated.”

I ignore him, my attention focused only on the sheriff.

“Go on,” I say to him. “Wave. You deserve it. Whatever happens, you’ve brought me to justice.”

For the first time, he gives me a truly honest smile. He looks so proud of himself in that moment it brings a tear to my eye.

“Wonderful,” I say.

Below, a few cheers have begun. I have their full attention. The final element to my plan. I don’t just need a body anymore, or at least not this one. I need a way back into the courtroom. I need the public to demand it.

“As I said, you won’t be forgotten.” And in a single movement, I plunge the sharpened chicken bone into his neck.

His eyes wide, he clutches the blood spurting from his wound, but it is too late. I shove him out the window.

The crowd below watches, screaming in horror as his body hits the ground and his neck snaps.

Blood spreads out beneath him onto the dirt like angel wings as the church bell rings a final time.

And, ladylike, I peer out the window and spit onto the corpse below.

“Now,” I say, turning round to the judge and wiping the blood from my hands onto my dress. “Where were we?”

25

Where He Stole Me

Two Years Prior

Texas

We travel two weeks by train to where the tracks end in a small, dusty part of Texas where Reginald is meeting a rancher to buy his land.

Outside my window, the sky is a blue so startling it doesn’t seem real. The birds look pasted on. Only when a feathered body swoops down to feed on whatever is hidden behind a hill of sand can I be sure it is not a painting.

I wait, breath held, for it to rise.

The Texas prairie does everything she can to make you look away. Her heat dazzles. Her light blinds. Everywhere there is the bone-white face of death.

The bird reappears, climbing toward the sky. There is no mistaking its treasure—a long, ropy slick of bloody fur. A fox, perhaps, or a piece of a coyote. I’ve been told there are both out here.

I am sick and shaking with withdrawal from Lucretia’s tea. With every bump on the train, I can feel my bones cracking against one another. When I look in a mirror, I don’t see a girl; I see one of the women from the asylum. The ones with nothing behind their eyes.

But somewhere in me, something is coming awake.

And in the gilt-framed mirror over the train’s lavatory sink, she emerges briefly, a glint of life sparking just beneath the death mask of my face. My shadow. And as I stare long and hard at my reflection, she drops me a single, promising wink.

When we arrive at the train station, a man is waiting to meet us.

The rancher says his name is Bill Eyre, and he arrives in a broken-down wagon with a three-legged cattle dog seated beside him.

“Hello, ma’am.” He tips his cowboy hat to me and then Reginald. His smile is cheerful, as are his voice and faded orange hair, but there is the slightest tinge of gray to his weather-beaten face. “Mr. Salinger. Fine day, isn’t it?”

I can feel Reginald’s disgust at having to sit in such an ignoble ride, and when the rancher bends down and kisses the mutt on the head before shooing it into the back to make room for us, my husband actually quivers.

But I am charmed that a man would not just keep something others might kill but love it all the same.

We arrive at his ranch, just a few log cabins and a sea of cattle, as far as the eye can see. They move across the prairie like a school of fish, whistled and goaded into line by a group of teenagers no older than me. Bill Eyre greets them all with a wave, then points out his son.

There is a freckled girl with white-blond hair cut short and a brick-builder’s body who not only wears men’s pants but slaps the rancher’s son on the shoulder as if she is his equal. Her white skin is burnt red in a way that tells me she has never worried about carrying a parasol. Another girl with brown skin and long black hair twisted on top of her head in messy braids lounges serenely by the fire, reading, with no one and nothing to bother her in the world. And a young serious-looking boy with a moon face and brown hair seems to be constantly carving something, his head cocked to the side as he turns the block of wood over and over against the knife in his hands. But it is the rancher’s son who keeps my attention.

After my captivity, he seems like the sun.

His freckled face is widened in a perpetual cheery grin and his hair is the color of flames. He even has his own clouds—a flock of birds that follows him wherever he goes. Now and again one nips down out of the sky to poach birdseed from his hands.

I’ve never seen anything like it or him in my entire life.

An ache, unexpected and dizzying, makes me close my eyes.

We follow the party out onto the acreage the rancher means to sell Reginald.

My husband is already leaking his father’s inheritance like a sieve from his pockets. He has hired a man to come out and put up a tent for us to sleep in, full of luxuries including a feather mattress, a washstand, and a set of fine glasses and ice with a fully stocked bar.

“This is it exactly,” Reginald says when he has me alone inside the tent. I’m embarrassed to be here. The rancher and his crew seem fine without any of these ridiculous trappings, and I’ve no doubt they’re mocking us. But Reginald does not seem to notice. He’s in a fine mood. “The fool is selling this land for a tenth of what it’s worth because of the barbed wire going up on the adjoining acreage. He can’t run his cattle through here any longer.”

I think of the man with the kind eyes, the lame animals that follow along behind him. The way he kissed the three-legged dog like a baby.

And I think if anyone is to act as this land’s steward, I’d far rather it was him.

“We’re practically stealing it!” Reginald cackles. Sunset is coming on, and my shadow grows taller. Watchful.

Outside, Eyre and his crew have left the cattle to graze and are making their own camp. I hear good-natured shouts and the crackle of a newly lit fire. The rancher turns in early, giving his young helpers the space to celebrate without him.

“Make me a drink and then come to bed,” Reginald commands. His eyes skim my body. “Hurry.”

He lies stretched across a fine down comforter, watching me like a snake waiting in the grass for a mouse to draw close.

“One moment.” I let him think I am playing the game he likes. The one where I make him wait before he devours me. “I want to get some fresh air. And I thought I saw some wild sage just outside. Why don’t I pick some and muddle it in your drink.”

“Don’t take too long.” His breath catches in his throat, laced with an edge of anticipation.

My heart speeds with dread. Outside, I see the rancher’s son and his friends. Far from going to bed, they are still joking and playing beside the campfire.

It is strange to see people like this. Young men and even women my own age allowed to exist so freely.

I can’t explain, even now, what makes me do what I do next.

I hurry and find the herb that I saw—not sage but a little purple flower with berries. I pluck them all. Silverleaf nightshade. Not so strong as the belladonna my mother grew but enough to make a man sleep.

And back in the tent, I drop it into Reginald’s drink.

“Put this on.” His voice is already slurry from the night’s earlier drinks as he tosses a gown onto the mattress.

And I shiver. Because there on the bed he has laid out not another woman’s dress but my own.

The plain gray dress from the asylum.

It is the one he saves for his darkest nights. The dress that still smells of stewed onions and sweat and the hard work and despair of a girl with no way out. He loves to make me slip it onto my freshly scrubbed skin and watch as I become her again. Scared. Hopeless. Completely dependent on him to save me.

“Put it on,” he repeats.

And I manage, just barely, to answer. To keep my voice playful. “I will. Finish your drink.”

He does.

At first I think it will not work. But then his glass crashes to the ground as his body folds onto the mattress, asleep.

Leaving him there, I creep out into the night.

The towheaded girl waves me cheerfully over, and I go. She is playing a harmonica while the whittling cowboy recites a poem.

I hardly look at them.

There is only him.

“Hello, Mrs. Salinger.” The boy with the sunshine in his face drops me a wicked wink, and my whole body lights with his fire. “My name is Cal. Cal Eyre.”

“It’s just Alice,” I say.

“Well, then, Just Alice. Care to dance?” Giving me a sly grin, he bows, as if we are in a ballroom instead of under the stars, and holds out his hand.

We dance until dawn.

Until all the others have gone to sleep. There is whiskey there. A bottle of mulberry wine the girl with the book says she made herself. But Cal and I never stop dancing long enough to drink any of it.

We don’t need to.

We are drunk on the night.

On ourselves.

He tells me of his own mother. Of her death when he was a little boy. Of growing up on a ranch with his kindhearted father, who was always picking up strays. Barn cats. Wounded wild things. People.

How his father is not just a father to him but has become one to this group of foundlings Cal considers as much his brothers and sisters as if they were born of the same mom. Which may be true, but he is also their leader.

I see it in their eyes as they watch us leave the circle. Their protective wariness mixed with devotion.

They would follow him anywhere.

But as the last star rises, we collapse to the ground, our feet spent from spinning all night long. He tells me of his father’s illness, and I remember the gray shadow I saw on the kind man’s face.

Cal tells me how he started to train the birds so that he would not have to think about it.

That the birds are his way of letting his thoughts fly somewhere else.

Somewhere pleasant and free.

That, at least, I can tell him I understand. I tell him of the wallpaper forest I lost myself in before here, and how since arriving to the desert, I’m beginning to think what a beautiful place it would be to fly free to. To lose myself in something wilder than even myself.

That’s when he looks at me. Really looks at me.

And then we stop talking.

I ease his pain with a single kiss.

And he eases mine.

And then we do what two young things do when they have become a single, bright star in each other’s lives.

We fall down onto the grass and become one.

Later, I’ll wish we had been more careful. Smarter. That we had at least made some effort not to get caught. But that is just wishful thinking. We are no more in control of that night than the fire is in control of itself when the wind catches it.

And when the first rosy-pink fingers of dawn paw across our naked skin, Reginald finds us.

“What the goddamn hell do you think you’re doing?”

Reaching toward us, he grabs my hair and yanks me out of sleep.

“Let me go!” For once I fight him. I kick and scratch, and then I feel the cold blade of his knife against my neck. His breath against my ear as he whispers what I’ve always known.

“I’m going to kill you.”

Through it all, Cal has not said a word. But I see him out of the corner of my eye as he stands, his hand balled into a fist.

“You are no kind of man,” he says.

I can hear the sneer in Reginald’s voice. “I’m man enough to own what you never can. And man enough to let you watch me take her from you forever.”

The knife presses more deeply into my neck, and I think that if I am going to die, at least I had this.

One final night where I was the one who burned.

And then Cal raises his fist and, giving a sharp whistle, flings it at Reginald’s face.

I feel a stream of tiny kisses, birdseed, and then the birds are on us. Dozens of feathers that beat like angel wings against my face.

Reginald’s knife slips in his confusion, and I reach lower to his waist and feel for his gun. I yank it away and slide out of the cloud of birds.

Cal is waiting for me. “Come on,” he says. He scoops up our clothes in one hand and then holds out his other to me.

Behind us, Reginald is fighting his way through the birds when he emerges, free.

“Alice!” Cal yells. But I’m not listening. I point the gun at Reginald and fire.

The bullet only grazes his leg—I’m no marksman—but Reginald’s face lights with fury as he doubles over to touch the wound. “You bitch!”

All our commotion has awoken the camp, and in the distance I see Cal’s father come running. I raise the gun and point it at Reginald again.

Bill Eyre arrives panting. He takes everything in in an instant. Our naked bodies. Reginald’s bloody leg. And then he holds out his hand for the gun.

We are only teenagers, after all, not murderers. At least not in his eyes.

I hesitate.

Shoot him! my shadow screams. Bury the bullet in his skull!

But I feel Cal watching me, waiting for me to do the right thing. I can’t bear to disappoint him. Not after last night. And so I hand the gun to his father.

He kisses the top of his son’s head just the way I watched him plant a kiss on the maimed dog before pointing the gun himself at Reginald. “You two get out of here. I’ll keep him from following.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” my husband grunts through gritted teeth. “You’ll pay for this.”

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” Cal’s father says. And then he speaks the last words he’ll ever say to his son. “I love you.” He wipes his eyes with the back of his free hand. “Now go.”

Cal throws himself at his father’s stiff body, hugging it tightly.

And then he takes my hand and together we fly.

Interlude

Frederick Fairchild

Past

Hell’s Half Acre, Kansas

He takes her on a picnic. It is spring, after all. He says it is because he wants their day to be as beautiful as she is, but she knows the truth. He doesn’t want his wife to find out.

Or, rather, he doesn’t want her to catch him. Men of his station are expected to take lovers. They simply aren’t expected to flaunt them, even when they are as beautiful and priceless as this one.

He takes her to Hell. She has chosen the spot. Hell is a rock that rises from the prairie like a tooth. Like a seamstress’s needle.

And that is what they have started to call her. The Seamstress. Her last lover has been found dead—skin sutured shut over the place where his heart used to be—the diamonds he’d tried to give her tucked neatly in its place.

And now the rumors have started. Rumors that people are beginning to pay attention to.

Like the fact that she doesn’t just steal men’s virtue.

She also steals their lives.

Not that he believes that. She’s just a girl, after all.

“How about here?” he asks, his eyes sparkling as he watches her. He thinks that this will be the night. His night.

After weeks of watching her.

Writing her letters.

Begging her to give him a private performance. She has, finally, agreed.

She is going to be his very own Queen of the Damned. She’s whispered the words to him. Made him a promise.

“If I’m damned, it’s you who’ve damned me.” He thinks he is being clever. Men like him are always being told they’re clever when they so rarely are.

“Yes,” she agrees, smiling. And oh my God, her smile. It is the thing poems are made of. It haunts his dreams. In them, it is all she’s wearing.

All she will be wearing.

She has sworn it to him. If he brings her something worthwhile. Something he thinks is worth her love.

And he has brought her the world.

A fortune that she can hold in one beautiful hand—the Queen’s Ransom, the only jewel fit for his queen. It is the largest diamond in the world.

Not that he’s really giving it to her. Once he owns her, he’ll own them both.

He has dressed for the occasion. His finest suit. One he has had made just for the occasion.

Fit for a wedding.

Or a funeral.

Because she has also made him bring a shovel.

“Dig,” she commands.

He has spread the picnic blanket out for her. A blanket of the softest lamb’s wool to crush the prairie grass so that they might lie upon it. And lie upon it she does, unpacking the basket of its wares.

The finest bottle of Chablis, chilled, its bottle sweating in the heat, the ice melting around it, tiny chips sparkling like diamonds.

With a twist of the cork, she frees the golden wine, drips it down her throat while he watches, the wet, sticky liquid spilling off her chin and onto the revealed expanse of her breast, dampening her low-cut dress.

A shudder works its way through his money-bought body. Young and fit from hours doing nothing but pleasuring himself in walks and horse racing. Hunting. Gentlemen’s pursuits.

Of which this is the most exquisite.

She blinks up at him, lolling back on the blanket, pulling out one new treasure after another from the basket.

Grapes, freshly plucked that morning from a greenhouse; a peach, grown out of season. Rare cheese shipped in from Switzerland, made from an exotic donkey’s milk. Belle takes a bite, letting the crumbles linger on her lips before licking them away.

Foie gras, a pound of it, eaten by the silver spoonful with Russian caviar heaped on top.

He is trembling now.

“Dig,” she says again, motioning toward the shovel.

He wants to say no. He wants to take her right now, right here on that square of wool, smash the grapes beneath them.

But that is the thing with a girl like her. Taking her is only good if she wants it.

Wants it like she makes it seem she will.

As he watches, she spreads her legs, the drape of thin fabric from her skirt falling between them. “Dig,” she says once more, and this time he does, standing up and grabbing hold of the shovel.

The first shovelful is hard, the earth baked into a crust from the lack of rain. He drives the point home, breaking through. It gets easier after that. Shovel after shovel, he throws the dirt aside. And with each foot the hole grows, she begins to sing.

So that he hardly notices the work, though he’s never done a day of manual labor in his life.

But for her, he will.

For her, he will do anything.

Even if it means losing his heart.

Part III

The Damned

26

Possession

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

“What have you done?”

“What I had to do for you to take me seriously.” The judge cowers beneath his desk as the churchgoers’ horrified shouts fill the air.

His hand creeps to his desk drawer.

I rush forward, but the gun is already out. He points it shakily at me.

“You don’t want to do that, Your Honor.” I speak in a soft, calming voice. “Put the gun down.”

Outside, a woman screams, no doubt someone who has finally pushed her way to the front of the crowd and seen what she could not before—the sheriff’s bloody body.

“You killed him,” the judge says wonderingly. “You just pushed Sheriff Hicks out that window to his death.”

“I stuck a chicken bone through his neck first,” I allow, “but let’s not get caught up in the details. The important thing is you believe me.” I take another step closer. It’s a delicate dance. Too fast and he’ll shoot me out of fear; too slow and he’ll shoot me because he’ll have time to realize it’s his best chance to survive.

Another step, and my foot cracks on a pencil that’s spilled to the floor in the confusion.

I hear the click of the gun’s safety.

“Put it down,” I say again, holding out my empty hands. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Ha.” He lets out a shaky laugh. “You’re the Seamstress. If I don’t kill you now, you’ll cut out my goddamn heart.”

His neatly groomed white beard quivers, but to his credit his gaze is steady. He is a far different breed of man than Hicks ever was. Harvard-trained, yes, but there is steel in his spine.

“I don’t want your heart, Your Honor. I want your justice.”

He doesn’t lower the gun. “I’d say shooting you would go a long way toward accomplishing that.”

Perhaps he’s right. But I want the world to see me hang. There can be no doubt about my death.

“If you kill me now,” I say softly, “they will think you were just a scared old man who killed a woman with no way to defend herself.”

“And if I don’t?”

“It’s not a question anymore, Your Honor. I’m guilty. I’ve killed your sheriff. I will go back to jail now, no fuss, and you’ll have your trial and see me hanged properly. Which is exactly what I wanted all along.” He’s listening. “The real question is whether you want to uphold the law and morals of this town as you’ve claimed, or if you want to become a part of the criminals and vigilantes who threaten it.”

I can tell that I’ve struck a nerve. Slowly, he lowers the gun. “Miss King, I’m going to have to take you at your word here.”

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted you to do,” I say truthfully. “A gentleman should always take a lady at her word, don’t you think?”

There is a commotion outside the door. The sound of voices. Shouting. “You see?” I say. “They’re coming for me already.”

Indeed, the door begins to shake with fists banging on the other side. It is locked, however, a final measure of security the sheriff took when bringing me here.

“Your Honor!” Shouts ring through the door. “Your Honor? Are you all right? Are you alive?”

There is the sound of a gunshot outside. And then another.

“Would you like me to let them in?”

“If you open that door, I do believe they’ll kill you,” the judge says.

“I do believe they’ll try.” I’m not afraid of a mob. I’m afraid that unless they see me here, hands still warm with guilt and the judge’s gun pointed at me, they’ll make an excuse for what I’ve done.

I want their anger, not their forgiveness.

He hesitates.

“I’m going to open it now,” I tell him. “And I’m going to trust you won’t shoot me in the back.”

The judge looks wounded. “I am a gentleman, madam.”

“Yes, well. Despite all those noble cowboy tales, I don’t find much difference in an honorable killing and a dishonorable one. And you were certainly ready to shoot me in the front a few seconds ago.”

A flash of shame crosses his face.

“Your Honor!” The shouts grow louder.

“Do we have a deal?” I say. “I open the door and you don’t shoot me?”

I’m already crossing the room to the door.

“Just a minute, Miss King.” The judge hurries behind me. “Just a goddamn…”

I throw open the door.

A rush of men in their black church suits descends, faces lit with holy fury. They cover me in a wave.

“There she is!” A thin man with beetle eyes roughly takes hold of my arm. I can still smell the communion wine on his breath. A blond man with whiskers so fine they are transparent grabs my other.

“Stop!” The judge is shouting and waving his gun. “By God, I want this done properly.”

But they are not listening.

And then, like the world’s oldest knight, the jailer, Brownie, shoves his way to the front of the mob.

It’s his gun I heard in the hallway, and now he fires it again. “Fall back!” he yells. “In the name of the law, fall back!”

Appearing beside him is the most unlikely of allies: the priest in his black robe.

“Let her loose!” he demands, waving his Bible at the crowd. “You know not what you do! In the name of all that is holy, you must give her to me! She is not yours; she is the Lord’s!”

“She just killed a man!” the blond fellow shouts. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re going to throw the bloody witch out the window just like she done him!”

A surge of excitement courses through the men. They have a plan now. And as one the mob surges toward the window, carrying me with it.

“Stop!” The priest forces himself and his Bible between them. “This woman didn’t kill that man. Her demon did.” He thrusts the Bible at me. “She is not in her right mind. This woman is possessed!”

And now the judge and Brownie join the priest, blocking the mob’s access to the open window.

The priest’s eyes flash as he speaks, his black frock catching the slight breeze from the window.

“Don’t you see? If you kill her now, the demon wins! We must save this poor woman’s soul!”

He really does have a fine voice. In another time and another place he’d have done very well as a showman with the Damned.

All in all, it’s a good bit of fun.

“Enough!” Brownie fires his gun again, this time just over the crowd’s head, sending a piece of the ceiling falling.

No one fires back. Apparently, none of the men thought to bring their weapons to church.

“Give her to the lawman,” the judge says quietly, raising his own gun. “I know all you men here. You’re good men. You came to Dodge for the same reason I did. To make something of it. Of yourselves. Killing a woman is no way to begin.”

The room falls silent as the madness leaves the men’s eyes and they realize exactly what they’re about to do.

Brownie steps forward with a pair of handcuffs. “I’ll make sure she’ll be punished for her actions. Let’s have justice, but let’s do it right.”

Grumbling, the blond man starts to push me forward, but the man beside him tries to pull me back.

Before he can, Brownie grabs me with his capable grip. He is standing straighter, I notice. His speech is surer. Clearer. And I can see the outline of the fine man he must have been.

He slips the cuffs onto my wrists, and as he does, I am close enough to kiss him.

Instead, I peek at the spot just over his heart.

There in his breast pocket is the faintest pop of red silk, tucked down so far that no one else can see it.

Our eyes meet and something passes between us. “I still got a job to do, Miss King.”

“Of course, Brownie.”

And with the judge and the priest flanking us, he leads me through the crowd and to my jail cell, where, once again, I am the property of the law.

Brownie locks the door. “You stay there, Miss King…”

As if I have any choice.

“I’ll be back in a moment. Just need to make sure none of those men tried to follow us.” He leaves me alone.

Or not entirely alone. There is a shadow at my window as dark as the deed I’ve done.

Standing on my cot, I reach for it.

Cal’s raven.

There is a small message tied to its foot. I untie it and dump the folded paper into my hand.

A single word is visible…

Dead

And then I unfold it to reveal the rest.

…wood.

The raven stares at me.

Then, with a mighty caw and a blink of its black eye, it hops back onto the window ledge and flies away, leaving only a black feather slowly floating down in its place.

“Miss King?” I quickly tuck the paper beneath my mattress and turn to face my jailer. I don’t know how I did not hear his footsteps on the stairs, especially with his pronounced limp.

“Yes, Brownie.”

“I’m afraid that your supper will be a little late tonight.” He frowns. “There’s some…trouble I need to take care of first.”

I don’t doubt that there is trouble. Probably quite a mess of other things too. Including the one beneath the judge’s window. Paperwork, at the very least, for the old sheriff’s death.

“I understand,” I say magnanimously. Killing always puts me in a good mood. “You’re very kind to let me know.”

He starts to go.

“Oh, and Brownie. One last thing.” He pauses, his back to me on the way up the stairs. “I don’t expect special treatment, only…” He waits. “My dress. They’ve ruined it.” I hold up the dangling bit of cloth torn nearly to my breast. “It’s unseemly. If you could just bring me a needle and thread? And ribbon for the collar? I could patch it quite nicely. After all”—I make my voice demur—“a seamstress shouldn’t hang without a good dress.”

He doesn’t turn around. “I’ll see what I can do.”

And I know even without my peek of the admirer’s cloth in his pocket that he means yes.

27

Blossom and Bone

Two Years Prior

Texas

What do you owe the person who saves your life?

Love?

Another life in return?

Or is it, perhaps, worse? Do you owe them nothing and then fill that nothing over and over again with what you think they deserve?

Texas goes on forever. All around us, there is endless, winter-parched grass. Spring has come, but the land is still brown and already hot. Animals with nowhere to hide must either blend into the landscape, like the brush-colored deer, or assume the wiles of a spiny lizard or Sonoran Desert toad, losing pieces of themselves and turning to poison in a predator’s mouth.

But at least there are no walls.

No Reginald.

Only wind and blinding, unforgiving light. The sun is so high and bright that my shadow barely exists.

On and on we run, my city shoes—snatched from the grass and slapped hurriedly on along with my clothes—rubbing my feet raw. When I stop, Cal patiently gives me his shoulder and we limp on. Finally, at dusk, tired and sun-blistered, we collapse beneath the shade of an old cottonwood tree, its skeletal branches blessedly green. I am sweat-caked, and the dirt sticks to my skin. The musk of our bodies, pungent and wild, is carried to my nose on a gust of hot wind.

A tick, starved enough to emerge early in the season, has attached itself to Cal’s leg, and he gently unburies it from his skin, making sure to get the head. But instead of crushing its body between his fingers as I would have done, he flings it into the grass, free to feed again.

“Are you hungry?” He looks sheepish now, unsure. Like the seventeen-year-old boy that he really is and not the man he’s been pretending to be. The freckles on his nose are a sprinkling of dirt some careless mother has forgotten to wash away.

They do something to me, those freckles.

“I could hunt us something.” His good-natured confidence quickly returns. He looks long and lean, like a painting of a sunburnt Adonis I saw once in a fine manor house in Paris with Reginald. “I’ve got my knife.” Cal makes it sound like it would be easy. An adventure. I’ll find out it is a habit he has. Making life a game that he promises you’ll win, with him.

“I’m fine.” I am hungry. Ravenously so. But there are more pressing things on my mind. “Let’s just get some sleep.”

“All right. But first I need to find us more water.” He stands, shaking loose the canteen from the satchel he blessedly grabbed along with his clothes. “It’s nearly gone.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No. Stay here. Rest.” He shades his eyes. “I think there’s a river down there where we used to bring our cattle. Won’t take but a minute.” He walks off, his narrow hips swinging like he’s riding a horse, and I watch him fade into the distance.

Sinking back, I press myself against the cottonwood’s warm bark.

I have traded my old life, but I don’t yet know what for. And I don’t think that Cal does either. I wonder if he regrets it, though he does not seem like a boy made for regret.

My fingers sift worriedly through the dirt, unburying a rock. Only when I hold it up, I see that it is not a rock at all but a tiny skull. White bone with a row of perfectly formed teeth.

I throw the dead thing quickly away. A rabbit picked clean by an owl or fox.

A few feet in front of me, my shadow dances, grown tall in the tree’s laced light, then bends to whisper in my ear—He might not come back.

And I wonder if she means she doesn’t want him to.

But half an hour later, there he is, arms and canteen full. “It’s like I remembered,” Cal says, dropping the sticks he’s carrying and nodding over his shoulder. “River’s just half a mile that way.”

Hunching into a cowboy’s squat, he carefully piles his gathered materials—grass, sticks, and dried animal dung. Cal has capable hands. “Fire will keep the animals away,” he explains.

Reaching into his satchel, he pulls out a travel-sized tinderbox, then uses his knife to strike the flint. Cal tells me that as a rancher, he is always prepared for the unexpected. He rarely goes anywhere without a knife, a tinderbox, a pack of cards. He strikes the flint again and a spark ignites. Cupping the grass with his hands, he blows, his lips taking the shape of a kiss. When he looks up and sees me watching, he gives a lazy smile and winks.

And I freeze.

This. This is the boy that all the other girls want.

The hero in all the stories.

He is in rough cowboy clothes, but I have seen a dozen young men like him in the ballrooms of Europe and hunting clubs of the East Coast.

They are the funniest, the loudest, the person beside the empty seat at the dinner table that everybody covets.

The gilded mirror that the most beautiful young women flicker around, wanting to be shown the beauty of their own reflection.

Boys like Cal are the prize. One I have no currency for winning.

But just for a moment, I pretend that I am like all the other girls. That there is not a part of me that must be tucked away like a secret—a third arm or a tail.

Just for a moment I pretend my shadow doesn’t exist, and I stand inside Cal’s light and smile.

He smiles back.

My heart stutters again, like it doesn’t know how to work. The feeling is wonderful and terrifying, and I don’t know if I hate it or want it to go on forever.

I only know that I have never felt anything like this before.

That I have never been allowed to.

Exhausted, I stretch my body beside the fire and watch the budding flames explode. There is only hard earth here, but it is the most delicious bed I’ve ever felt.

Because it is my bed—and on this dirt I can do whatever I please.

Cal eases himself down alongside me, spreading out his gangly body. “I almost forgot!” Looking pleased, he hoists himself onto one elbow and with his other hand pulls something from his breast pocket. “I found this by the river.”

It is a wild bluebonnet. I’d been digging up skulls while Cal has discovered a single, perfect flower. I take it carefully into my hands.

“Alice.” Cal’s voice cracks with nerves, and when I look up, I see his wide blue eyes trained on me. “Do you love me?”

It is such a childish question that I almost laugh. We’ve only known each other for a few hours.

But Cal hurries on before I can stop him. “Because I think I could love you.” His face breaks open into a guileless smile, one that’s surely charmed plenty of other girls. “Hell, maybe I already do.”

And in that second, I understand Cal. For him, love is simple—just another adventure. Plucked and given as easily as this wildflower. It is as pure and real as the black earth that grows grass for his father’s cattle, or the birds whose broken wings he mends around the campfire. Its presence is as constant as the sun that even now leaks its bloody wound over our heads.

Because I don’t want to lie to him or myself by answering, I lean forward and kiss him instead.

And though I have shot two men, kissing a boy here in the fading light, without last night’s irresistible spell to carry me away or my shadow to guide me, feels like the bravest thing I have ever done.

Around us, the heat of day cools to a devil’s liquid silver. Dusk descends and gray laces the night. But as my dry lips press to Cal’s, it is like a warm glow comes straight down from heaven and fills me. Like God has taken one of Mama’s great big mason jars and stuffed it full of fireflies.

And for the first time in a very, very long time, I am not alone.

My fingers undo the buttons of my dress, wanting only to let that light out.

Cal pulls away.

“You don’t have to do that.” His breath is heavy. “I don’t expect it. Last night—it doesn’t have to happen again.”

And I don’t know yet how to tell him that I think I might want to. That what we did last night woke something inside of me. That I am kindling and his lips are the spark.

So instead I roll over and just let him hold me, carefully, like somebody’s breakable teacup as the sky above us grows dark. And when he is asleep, I reach for his knife.

Because if I stay any longer, Cal will only be disappointed. He will find out the girl he saved is not the one he imagines her to be at all.

I was always going to leave; I just didn’t know when.

Carefully, I place the wildflower he gave me on his breast.

Then, stealing off, I abandon him there—fast asleep and dreaming of something I can only hope isn’t me.

I’m almost to the river when I see it—a small spark of light bobbing toward me.

Run, my shadow insists. Cal’s noticed you’re gone, and now he’s come after you. You have to hurry. If you stay, he’ll find you.

Part of me still wants to feel his touch. To dare to kiss him again and not stop. To drink that first scalding cup of tea and call it my own.

Whenever I want.

Whenever I want.

Whenever I…

I turn to go, but it is too late.

“Don’t move.” A man’s growl cuts through the dark, and in the glow of a raised lantern, I see the metal of a gun.

Not Cal.

I steady the knife in my hands.

A girl steps into the light, followed by three others. Cal’s foundlings, the teens his father had saved and hired to work at his ranch.

“Shoot her.” The girl’s voice is clear. Her arms are crossed over her breast. “Shoot that bitch right now, Cash.”

The young cowboy holding the gun steadies it. Clicks free the safety.

And then, blessedly, Cal does appear.

“What’s going on?” He steps into their tiny circle of light, his face sleepy with confusion. Even in the commotion I am surprised to notice that he’s tucked the bluebonnet I left him into the pocket at his breast.

“Dom? Ama? What are you doing here? And, Cash, put that gun down! That’s Alice!”

“We know exactly who she feckin’ is.” Ama’s spit lands at my feet. “This is all her fault.”

“Enough.” A calm voice carries through the night as the largest figure steps forward. “That ain’t why we’re here.” Dom throws her large arms around Cal and pulls him to her like a mother.

Only then does Cash finally drop the gun. And when he speaks, it is worse than any bullet.

“It’s your father, Cal. The bastards hung him.”

28

Stripes

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

Brownie arrives at dawn with a pile of folded cloth in his hands and a seamstress’s kit of ribbons and thread.

“I don’t guess you could kill me with a needle,” he says wryly.

“Now, Brownie. Why would I ever want to kill you? You’re the only gentleman in this place.” I glance pointedly at his breast pocket and the kerchief hidden there and am surprised to see a new star pinned to his front.

“Have they made you sheriff?”

“It’s just temporary,” he allows. “Judge said we needed somebody until the hanging.”

“First intelligent thing that man has done.”

A pleased flush creeps up along his cheeks as he unlocks the door to my cell and hands me the fabric and supplies for mending my dress.

“Is it all right?” he asks. “Your husband, he said you’d prefer a sturdy cotton blend to something fancy.”

“Did he?” I turn away to hide my expression. “Speaking of the devil, where is he?”

Brownie frowns. “What with all the commotion, the judge has forbidden visitors.”

Laying my hand on the folded white cotton, I run my fingers up and down along its unblemished length. It feels familiar. As if I’ve touched it a thousand times before.

Wedding gowns were not the only thing my mother sewed.

She also sewed for death.

In the mountains of Kentucky, one was as likely as the other, and women would bring freshly cleaned bedsheets to my mother when they had nothing else. And my mother’s fine hands would work the worn and bleached fabric into a burial shroud. In a matter of hours, her stitches would form the outline of a cocoon meant to transform the earthly pockmarked or death-bloated faces into the blank white of heavenly creatures, ready to fly home.

“It’s just right,” I say, turning around and offering Brownie my smile as a reward. “Please tell my husband thank you. He’s chosen perfectly. I can even sew a whole new dress with this.”

I wait for him to leave.

But Brownie lingers.

“I was wondering,” he says, twirling the toothpick in his mouth, “if you might do me a favor.”

“That depends.” He is bargaining, which I don’t like, but I do respect. “What is it?”

“Nothing much.” Brownie digs something from his pocket. “Was just hoping you’d sign this for me is all.”

He passes through a small, cut-out newspaper clipping.

I stare at the faded yellow print. “Where did you get this?”

Beneath a picture of a tiger is a bolded headline: Man-eater Missing After Keeper’s Grisly Death.

Feeling for my cot, I shakily lower down onto its hard surface, tossing the pile of fabric aside.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” Brownie says, sounding pleased. “That animal’s the one that belonged to the Birdman.”

The photo is grainy. A roaring tiger sits on a small wooden freight box while a man holds a whip above her head.

“She didn’t belong to anyone,” I answer. But with a trembling hand I begin to read.

The Brooklyn crowds got more show than they bargained for last night at the Big Top when showmaster Bartholomew Jenkins was tragically killed by his star, a four-hundred-pound Bengal tiger named Omisha—goddess of death.

“A hard thing to stomach,” one of the onlookers said. “I used to be a deep-sea fisherman, and I saw a shark do much the same to a corpse we tossed overboard.”

The attack came, according to spectators, toward the end of the act, wherein the tiger’s performance partner—a male tiger—was supposed to jump through a ring of fire but refused.

When the handler used his circus whip, Omisha attacked, devouring the handler whole.

“She was the gentlest of creatures before that,” said a shocked Mary Lightfoot, the circus’s resident tightrope walker. “The sweetheart would rub against me when I’d pet her. Just like a house cat!”

But others were not convinced of the tiger’s supposed good-nature. Strongman Alan Higby said he’d had encounters with the beast before. “She didn’t like men. Used to snap at my hand anytime I tried to play with her some through the cage’s bars.”

Whatever the reason for the tiger’s attack, one thing is certain—the creature is now a bona fide man-eater and must be put down.

Unfortunately, Omisha’s whereabouts are still unknown.

“She disappeared in the commotion directly after the attack,” Constable Archibald Weathers told reporters. “Probably stolen by someone in the circus looking to make a buck selling her. But I warn them: This animal’s had a taste of flesh. She’s killed before, and she’ll kill again. It’s like that old saying—a tiger don’t ever change its stripes.”

I sit there for several seconds, stunned. I had not known anything about Omisha’s life before joining us.

None of us had.

Brownie watches me carefully. “I figured there couldn’t be too many man-eating tigers named Omisha making their way across the country.” He sinks down on his heels like a man might do when approaching an animal and trying not to spook it. “That was the tiger’s name, wasn’t it? The one that got your lover arrested?”

I don’t answer. But suddenly the harmless Brownie does not seem so harmless at all.

My breath is coming heavily. Brownie inches closer. “Say, you think what the papers wrote is true? You think the Birdman’s coming to rescue you?”

I shake the news article at him. “Why did you give me this?”

A look of keen knowing crosses his face before disappearing, replaced by an innocent grin. “Shucks,” he says, dangling a pen between the bars. “Like I said. Was just hoping you’d sign it. Will make a real nice keepsake for after the hanging.”

I take the pen. Close enough to see the red silk hidden in his pocket.

Close enough to jam it through his pulsing white neck.

He doesn’t move.

“What do you think, Belle?” he whispers softly. “It says that tiger’s handler tried to hurt her mate. You think she killed out of love?”

“It’s a nice thought, Brownie.” With a single slash, I sign my name across the paper’s front and shove it through the bars. “But here’s another one. I think she was a goddamn tiger. Maybe she just liked the taste of blood.”

29

The Damned

Two Years Prior

Texas

This, then, is what I owe Cal—his father’s life.

“He can’t be dead.” Cal’s face crumples like a child’s as Cash stokes the campfire’s flames. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“That girl’s husband went to the law,” Cash says. “Said a boy tried to kill him and then kidnapped his wife. Your father took the blame. Said he was the one who pulled the trigger. That he did it to save his son.” Cash shakes his head. “Mr. Salinger’s a federal marshal, Cal. The law says they had every right to hang a man who shot one of their own.”

Heat rushes to my face. My husband had known full well I was the one who shot him, but he’d still laid the blame on Cal and then let them kill Cal’s father anyway.

He’d done it to punish me. So that I would blame myself for his death just as I’d done for my mother.

And I do. Of course I do.

But this time, guilt is not the only thing I feel. I also feel rage.

Cal collapses to the ground, and I wrap my arms around him and hold him close. I know, after all, what it is like to lose a parent.

“I made sure he didn’t suffer.” Cash steps where Cal can see him and lightly touches his gun.

And then I remember what Cal told me about this strange cowboy—once upon a time he’d been a hangman’s son. He’d traveled across the west with his father and turned to writing poetry and whittling pretty things to chase away the horror of what he saw.

He would know exactly how much a man who hung could suffer.

And he would know exactly when and how to stop that suffering with a bullet.

“We have to get out of here, Cal,” Ama says. “Her husband is looking for her. If we can find you this easy, so can he. He says he’s going to kill you when he finds you.” Then she glares at me. “Let’s give him back this murdering bitch. Then maybe he’ll leave you alone.”

Cal looks at Ama as if she’s struck him. “It’s not Alice’s fault he’s dead. My father died to help me save her. That has to mean something.”

The words loop like a noose around my neck.

“What were you doing out here alone anyway?” Ama asks, turning on me. “And with Cal’s knife?”

“I was…relieving myself,” I say, not liking how quick she is to notice these details. “I took Cal’s knife for protection.”

“Let her alone, Ama.” Cal’s voice is firm. But I think I hear a tremor of doubt at the end.

“We’ll do whatever you want,” Cash says. “Your father gave us all second chances. A good life. We’re family, Cal. If you run, we run too.”

The two Russian brothers who have until now hidden in the shadows come forward and silently nod in perfect tandem.

“Together,” Dom agrees. She holds out her hand like an offering. “We don’t have much, but we know how to take care of each other.” Her eyes land on Ama. “Cal’s father never judged us. He gave us a chance to be a part of something. So if you want, we’ll try to give you that too.”

“If you help me, you’ll be outlaws,” Cal says.

“Outlaws.” Ama grins, and I see why Cal likes her. It’s dazzling, that grin—like a light offered in a dark cave. “That’s the first interesting thing you’ve said all night.” Ama considers me, and in the winking lantern’s light I can see the worry stitched across her face, but still she turns to Cal and says, “All right. I’m in.”

It is an uneasy truce. They don’t want me here. But they are doing this for Cal—to soften the blow I’ve dealt him.

And after what I’ve cost Cal, cost all of them, it’s only fair that I tell the truth. To give them a way out. To give me one too. “Reginald won’t stop,” I say. “Not until I’m dead.”

I’m shocked when it’s Ama who answers. “That bastard ain’t the only one with a gun.”

“Don’t worry, Alice.” Cal’s voice is grief-scratched but sincere as he takes my hand. “It’ll be okay.”

And in his eyes I can almost see that tender thread of chance winding more tightly around us, until it resembles something like fate.

—

The next morning we make our way back into the world together as fugitives.

And at dusk, just outside the newly birthed cattle town of Colorado City, Texas, we stumble into a hanging.

A mob swarms the downtown.

I try to get Cal away from there. We all do. But he wants to stay. Insists on staying.

He knows that the man they’ve condemned is not his father, but it is the only goodbye that he gets to give.

So we set up camp on a hill where he can see the jailhouse and its gallows. Cal sits there all night, staring at it.

And I do the only thing I can think to do. The thing that I had forgotten was a part of me.

I sing.

I sing for the boy being hanged.

And I sing for Cal’s father.

At first nothing happens. But then I close my eyes and let her out. Just a little. So that no one can see her but me.

It is the same song I used to sing for my mother.

The same one I sang the night she was killed.

But with my shadow the song is richer. Darker.

More powerful.

And as we sing, I feel a shifting current in the air. An electricity. Like I am taking the ache inside of me and sending it out into the great, wide world.

Then the strangest thing happens. The rest of Cal’s strays join me. Ama and Cash and Dom and the twins. Dom plays her harmonica and Ama and the twins dance and Cash lights a fire to see by.

We are outlaws.

Outcasts.

Thieves of regret and remorse.

And slowly, oh-so slowly, the crowd that has come to see the morning’s hanging comes to see us. It’s just a few people at first. A cowboy who is the condemned man’s brother. A family headed west, stopped to see the hanging for some entertainment.

A gold miner. A saloon owner from town.

More and more people come. And they join in our dance. In our celebration of life.

As I sing, they begin to toss coins at me. So I sing another song. And another. Cash takes off his hat and places it at my feet and it begins to fill. People drink more. Cry more. Laugh.

Live.

Because they recognize something in us. Something they have denied in themselves.

We show them what they have lost in choosing to kill their darkness.

We are its beauty.

We are the Damned.

And I know then that I will stay.

But there is something else. Something more—the want that has awakened inside of me.

And I think maybe that’s the real reason I don’t go.

I know now that I cannot lose my shadow.

She is as much a part of me as my own breath.

But maybe I can contain her.

Hide her like a dirty slip beneath my dress.

Give her just enough air to survive.

Maybe if I let her have the darkness, I can have Cal’s light—if only for a little while.

Reaching down, Cal kisses me, tenderly, on the space between my brows.

And my desire beats a pitter-patter over my heart. For this. For all of it.

Whenever I want.

Whenever I want.

Whenever I want…

30

A Letter

Colorado City, Texas

Dear Mary Parker,

I am alive.

31

A New Dress

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

Unfolding the white cloth, I begin to sew. Tomorrow, I will enter court as an infamous criminal, but in these final hours I am just a seamstress like my mother.

Brownie has brought me enough fabric for an entirely new dress, and so that is what I will make. I will sew my own burial shroud.

In and out. In and out. The needle plunges through the material, eating it up in neat little bites.

And somewhere, just out of sight, my husband waits for me to finish.

Brownie has been generous with his seamstress’s kit. Beside the needles, buttons and lace are neatly heaped in a little pile.

Reaching in, I pull out a long spool of ribbon the color of blood.

There are no scissors—the man is not a fool—and so I must bite through the strip.

Flecks of red stick between my teeth.

I bite the fabric until my mouth is bloody. Until I have what I need. One longer strip for a belt and twelve equal pieces that I begin to thread through my dress, one stitch at a time.

Each stitch is a memory.

A space between a heartbeat.

And I sew those in too, each broken bit a crimson gash of satin.

Like wounds.

Like desire.

Like catching the tail of a tiger and refusing to let go.

Maybe if I’d never joined the Damned—if I’d simply kept running when I saw that light—everything would have been different.

But there are things you can take the stitches out of and things you can’t. Things that are far too delicate.

Like silk.

Like love.

And so I sit quietly in my cell and keep sewing. In and out. In and out.

Because once you’ve plunged in the needle, it does no good to wonder what that fabric would look like without its marks.

32

Where He Killed Me

Two Years Prior

Deadwood, Dakota Territory

If there be devils, would I were a devil, to live and burn in everlasting fire.

The words ink a tattoo across my brain.

They are a quote from Ama’s book of Shakespeare. Each night, as we travel across the territories, she reads to us.

But far from burning, we are freezing.

It is only our bodies at first. April is brutal on the open plains, and this year has been worse than most. We make our way through late-spring blizzards that turn to thunderstorms at month’s end. The high winds and drenching moisture penetrate us to the very bone. We have only our leaking tents and worn blankets for protection, and even these get picked up and put back down each night like some child’s toy blocks.

It’s not enough.

Our pace is relentless. Cal insists on twenty miles a day, and so we “borrow” horses that we find in pastures along the way and, when those wear out, leave them in some new farmer’s barn so they don’t starve.

We are running, but we don’t know where.

May brings warmer skies, but the freeze simply leaves the air and settles between us. Even Cal’s cheer becomes frozen, hardened to a tempered glass that refuses to break. But it is the coldness inside me that worries me most. I have solidified into a mirror of the girl I think they want me to be. A girl worth Cal’s father’s life. I am endlessly careful, lest anyone see even a glimpse of my shadow.

It cannot last. We are dancing on the knife blade of fate and soon enough someone will get hurt.

Which is why, when we stumble into Deadwood and see the poster, I know exactly what they are going to do.

What I would do if the prize were not me.

MISSING: ALICE SPRINGER

WIFE. BELIEVED UNWELL.

$1,500 REWARD

The shock of seeing my face staring at me in black and white is like seeing my own corpse. Till now we’ve been able to avoid most of the bigger towns, staying on the cattle trails Cal learned from his father. But those ended here in Deadwood.

“That son of a bitch,” Ama whispers softly. The poster is plastered to the window of the sheriff’s office. Around us the bustle of people brings a false sense of warmth, but it is short-lived. Night is falling, and already the rains are starting. “That’s more money than your father’s ranch makes in a year!” she says to Cal. “Made,” she amends, and I see her eyes flick back to me.

Desperation has driven us here.

Deadwood is a city made for sinners. Stolen from the Lakota in a gold rush, and paid for in Custer’s worthless blood, the new settlement is full of outlaws and thieves. Yet its ambition rivals the oldest cities back east. It has lights, for one. Real electric lights just installed that turn the streets at night into a crackling wonderland. Less than a year and 1,800 miles away from New Jersey, where Edison first displayed his incandescent lamp, this town glows. Dusty cowboys are painted with an angel’s halo from streetlights overhead, and the hot white light leaking from saloon doors beckons weary travelers in.

From inside its saloons, I hear languages from all over the world mixing with the din of a player piano—Mandarin, Polish, German, Lakota, Czech. Necessity creates equals here, and people this far from the law help one another as much as they steal. Legends are born and die. The famous Black cowboy Nat Love wins himself a rodeo and the nickname Deadwood Dick. The white lawman Wild Bill Hickok is killed over a hand of cards.

And the city’s new lights are as dangerous as they are pretty. A gambler can, for the first time, meet another’s eyes at the gaming table. See clearly the man he means to cheat.

Tomorrow there is to be a hanging of such a man—one they found with four aces tucked into his boot.

And the Damned mean to perform.

Or meant to, anyway. This far from Texas, we thought we were outside of Reginald’s reach.

This poster changes everything.

“We should leave,” Cal says. His voice is steady, but there is a note of something there. “No need to tempt the devil. We’ll find another town.” He looks to the usually agreeable Dom to second his decision, but she crosses her arms.

“Hold your horses,” Dom says. “We’re hungry, Cal. Tired. There’s not another city around for miles, and we need money.”

Ama has wanted to find another hanging far before this one, but Cal refused. “We don’t need to chase our luck, Ama. It’ll find us.”

And so the Damned have performed in saloons instead. Small shows with small rewards.

Dom arm wrestles men for a wager while Cash recites poetry and the Russian brothers, Uri and Boris, tumble through the crowd, holding out their hats for tips. When they are finished, Ama reads everyone a bedtime story, lounging on the bar in only her slip and cursing any man who dares not pay attention. Cal ends with a few tricks from his birds.

All the while, I’ve sat hidden in a corner, watching.

Ama would scold, “Why didn’t you at least grab that man’s pocket watch? He took it off with his jacket. It was lying right there on the table beside you!”

But I can’t—I am too busy pretending to be a girl who is worth saving.

Someone who is Good.

Someone who is Kind.

Someone who is Pure and True.

Though far from winning them over, Ama’s cool huff and Cash’s turned back seem to suggest that my efforts have served only to annoy them.

Cal rips down the poster and crumples it in his hand. “If the bastard has started searching even this far north, he must be close. Why else have this here?” He stares at each of them. “You know what he’ll do to Alice if he finds her. To all of us.”

“Forget that.” Ama looks at me like she might a piece of food caught in somebody’s teeth. “We can run tomorrow, Cal, but I’m too tired to go another step today. We need sleep.” She wrinkles her nose as she lifts up her armpit. “A goddamn bath.”

“We don’t have any money for baths,” Cal says. Frustration creeps into his words.

“We will after the hanging tomorrow,” Ama replies evenly.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Cal raises the crumpled paper and shakes it in her face. “Her husband’s put a price tag on her head! If Alice is seen, there will be a mob to collect the reward.”

“Then let’s at least regroup,” Dom says before Ama can protest. Her voice is soothing. “Set up camp.”

Cal finally listens. But only because there is no other choice.

We make a tired camp just south of the city.

And while the others finish setting up their tents, Cal does what he always does—he tries to make me happy—and there, outside Deadwood, he teaches me how to fly.

Taking my hand, he guides me away from our camp out into a small copse of trees, his birds trailing behind.

Cal’s flock is a strange one, made up of any kind of bird imaginable—doves, meadowlarks, hawks, even prairie grouse. Its makeup changes from town to town. But not the ravens. They will fly for miles to be by his side.

This evening, the sky shines a brilliant white that frosts the trees around us with ice, and I think of fairy tales and magic. Cal, taking my hand, gently leads me into the center of a circle of trees.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Watch.” Leaving me there, he backs away. Slipping two fingers into his mouth, he gives a sharp whistle.

The ravens dive toward me, and I cringe, holding up my hands to block my face.

Instead—as delicately as my mother might have handled tatted lace—the ravens each take a piece of my dress in their beaks.

And they rise.

For a second, no more than two, I am lifted off the snowy ground.

Then they gently set me down and fly away. I clap my hands in delight as Cal rushes to kiss me. “I’ve been working on it for weeks! You looked just like an angel.” But something in his voice is sad. “I’d give you real wings if I could.”

I know he’s thinking of the poster. “I won’t let that bastard get you, Alice,” he whispers.

I try to swallow the panic that flutters to my throat. That though I’ve fled one cage, a new one is materializing around me.

When we return to camp and bed down for the night, Cal loops an arm protectively around my waist, lying beside me.

I wait until he is asleep before I slip from under him and make my way outside.

If I don’t sleep, maybe my shadow won’t find me.

If I don’t sleep, maybe I can become exactly the sort of girl I am pretending to be.

Because no matter how hard I try to hide her, rather than becoming less real, she becomes more. I can see her clearly now. It is a girl. The same one that hid in a wallpaper forest and followed me here. She looks like me but not. I don’t know her name, but I know that she is the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen. Her hair is black, and her eyes glow a terrible yellow. But it is the expression in her face that scares me the most.

It is completely and utterly without fear or mercy.

I wonder what it would be like to live that way, and when I sleep, she tells me that I can.

That I no longer have to dream of Reginald, to worry if he will come after me.

That I can draw him to me instead.

“But what of Cal?” I whisper to her. “What will happen to him if Reginald comes?”

But she only smiles her dark smile and beckons me closer, and if I find sleep, it is as her.

So I don’t let myself slumber.

The cold air shocks me awake. Cal’s ravens hover in a nearby tree, lifting their silky black heads as I emerge. Their eyes pierce me with an accusing glow.

I start to call to them, but before I can, a pair of strong arms wraps around my throat.

“Shh. Hush, Alice. Nobody wants to hurt you.”

Ama binds my hands behind me, and Cash gags my mouth, gently but firmly, as Dom and Uri and Boris keep watch outside of Cal’s tent.

And in the quiet of the moonlight, with only the ravens watching, the Damned take me.

We stumble back into Deadwood just before midnight. But rather than stop at the sheriff’s, Dom urges me on.

Our feet slosh against the mud-puddled grass until we arrive, finally, at the stagecoach depot. An empty passenger carriage sits in front of a dark office.

I feel the slice of a knife as the ropes on my hands fall away and the gag is pulled from my mouth.

“It leaves at dawn,” Cash says.

I stare at them in confusion. “What are you doing?”

Ama shoves a wad of money at me. I’ve no idea where she got it. “Go on. Take it.”

“You’re not going to turn me in?”

“God knows I want to.” Ama looks pained. “But we can’t do that to Cal.”

“He needs to move on,” Cash says softly. “We all do, Alice. And he can’t do that with you here.”

Dom steps forward. “You need to understand something. Cal is a good kid. His father was a good man. But they had this thing about them. They were always collecting wounded animals—the wilder the better—and trying to fix them. They’d make pets out of them. Tame them and then bring them into the house. Hell, one time Cal even had a baby fox sleep in his bed until it tore through the screen door and ate up all the chickens.” She laughs, but it is grim. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but I don’t think you’re the type of girl who can be house-trained. Not really. And the worst thing for Cal is letting him pretend that you are.”

I stare at the cash in my hands. It is over a hundred dollars. More than generous. Foolish. Especially when they have no other way to survive. They must have wanted me gone badly to have saved it this long.

“Maybe Cal just needs to start sleeping outside.”

“Trust me,” Dom says, shaking her head. “It will be better for everyone if we never see you again.”

I watch them leave in stunned silence. Crumpling the money in my fist, I think back to all those cold nights when we had so little to eat. Nights that I thought we were all in this together.

Instead, they’d been hoarding money that could have gone toward our food and plotting to get rid of me.

It hurts more than I want to admit.

But they’re right. It would be better if I was gone. Better for me too. I could stop trying so hard to hide from myself.

And I know in my heart that Cal would even learn to forgive himself for his father’s death and find a new purpose for living—boys like him always do.

But the truth is, I don’t want to go.

The past two months, no matter how hard, have been the best ones since my mother’s death.

The Damned live a life that is wild and beautiful and free.

I want that for myself.

Still want that first cup of tea. To feel it burn my heart and throat.

Let it set me on fire.

Shoving the money in my pocket, I start after them, marking their figures as they disappear into one of the town’s saloons, no doubt trying to make back some of the money they’ve lost on me.

When I open the door, I see Ama jumping onto the bar, lugging her giant Shakespeare book with her, ready to read the crowd a bedtime story.

I know before she does that it is going to go wrong. Because while they have performed, I have watched, just as I used to do with Reginald.

Ama has done the same thing a few times before in the tiny towns we’ve crept through. Pocketed tips while the rest of the Damned picked pockets.

But those were farmers. Family men.

Deadwood is a miners’ town. And tonight’s only comfort is violence and whiskey.

These men don’t want a bedtime story; they want a fight.

As the first one reaches for Ama, trying to yank her off the bar, another pulls out a knife.

Dom rushes the man with the knife and shoves him to the ground as Ama slams the Shakespeare book on the other’s head. Cash cocks his pistol.

And that’s when I see it—the poster above the bar with my face staring back. The same one hanging outside the sheriff’s office.

MISSING: ALICE SPRINGER

Alice Springer cannot walk into that saloon.

But maybe she doesn’t have to.

Grabbing the nearest half-full glass of whiskey, I fling it at the bar.

Glass explodes everywhere, and for a single second, all eyes swing to me.

I stand up tall and firm. Shoulders thrown back. Head raised and grinning.

My expression nothing like the unsure girl in the picture.

“Any of you bastards interested in a wager?” My shadow’s voice is dark and deep. Its timbre commands a room.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ama whispers, looking up at my approach.

But my shadow ignores her, hefting the giant volume of Shakespeare away from her and onto the nearest table. “A hundred dollars that girl can recite any line from this here book!” The men look at me, dubious. “There are over a thousand pages in here. Just think about those odds!”

My shadow gives the words a few seconds to sink in before asking again. “Now. Who wants to make some easy money?”

Chaos erupts. Men shove their way toward the front, each waving cash in their hand.

But it is the one who first grabbed Ama who shouts the loudest. Drunk and slurring, he is built like a bull, with large silver bands laced around his fingers.

“I’ll put up five hundred!” His spit lands directly by Ama’s foot. She doesn’t flinch. “Providing that bitch can pay me when I win.”

“Oh, I promise you’ll be paid,” my shadow says as I move to stand toe-to-toe with him. “One way or another.”

Shoving me aside, the giant grabs the book off the table. A large bruise is already welling up on his forehead from where Ama hit him with it.

He clears his throat and, grinning lewdly, begins to read in the halting stumble of a man who never made it out of primary school. “ ‘The devil shall have his…bargain. For…he was never yet a breaker of…proverbs. He will give the devil his due!’ ”

Finished, he gives an ugly, barking laugh and holds out his hand. “That’s right, bitch. Give this devil his due.”

Bar patrons crowd closer around me, squinting down at the pages to the next line.

I tense, trying not to show my fear. At night, when Ama reads to us, she barely looks at the pages. I’m hoping her memory is as smart as her mouth.

But for a moment, I think that I’m wrong.

For a moment, she says nothing at all.

And then, in a clear, rich voice, she answers.

“ ‘Then art thou damned for keeping thy word with the devil.’ ”

The room erupts. “By God, that’s it! The girl’s done it.”

I use the distraction to slip a five-dollar bill from the rolled-up money in my sweaty hand to the man with the fiddle beside him. “Play something,” I tell him. “Quick.”

And he does, going right into “Old Lady and the Devil.”

Nobody notices the bullish man who lost the bet stalk angrily outside without paying.

But I do.

Scooping up a broken shard of glass, I follow.

And there in the dark of the alley where he pulls down his pants to relieve himself I slide behind him. Wrap my arm around his waist and press the glass between his legs.

“If you move, it will be the last piss you take.”

I feel him tense with fear. And something in me—in her—goes electric.

It is a relief to let her, finally, out.

To stop pretending that she does not exist.

When I lived with Reginald, he would sometimes let me read, but only what he chose. Never Shakespeare. Books for young ladies, mostly. Morality books, in which the heroine learns to behave. Always, in those books, there was the threat of what happened to girls who didn’t. Shadowed whispers of men the likes of the one in the alley with me right now. What they might do to you if you chose to put yourself in a compromising position.

If you lost the most precious part of yourself.

Never was there even the thought that a man might be vulnerable too.

That women aren’t the only ones with something to lose.

That men weren’t the only ones with rage.

“What do you want?” The giant barely ekes out the words, and I realize that I am pressing hard enough to draw blood.

His silver-wrapped knuckles press against the wall.

“You owe me money,” I say calmly.

His breath quickens with anger, but the barest flinch of my hand reminds him what he stands to lose.

“All right, all right,” he says, his voice jagged. “Let me get it.”

Reaching into his pocket, he grabs a silver certificate worth a hundred dollars. Won, no doubt, gambling.

“You owe me five,” I say, pressing harder. “Five hundred dollars.”

His voice becomes a whine. “I ain’t got it!”

“Then you shouldn’t have bet it,” I say. “But I’m feeling generous. I’ll take your rings instead.”

He starts to protest.

“Now.” I press the glass deeper.

Holding out his hand, he lets me pull the rings from his meaty fingers one by one. I slip the heavy silver bands into my pocket. And then I content myself with a final, shallow slice.

The feel of it is more thrilling than even Cal’s kiss.

“If you so much as dream about coming after me, I swear I’ll finish the job.”

I leave him doubled over in the alley and crying.

I’ve never felt so alive.

Inside, the fiddler is still playing. The mood is cheerful, and Ama is dancing on the bar to hollers from the crowd below.

“Here,” I say, jumping up and handing her the money. “For your troubles.”

“See.” She grins. “Not house-trained.”

And I’m not sure if the joy I feel that makes me smile back is from Ama’s hard-won approval or the memory of holding a man’s life in my hands.

“Now, this is some fun,” Ama shouts over the music. “Was starting to think you didn’t know how.”

“Was starting to think I didn’t either,” I say.

Which is exactly when Cal walks through the door.

I watch as his eyes widen in horror at the poster above my head.

“Shit,” I whisper.

I don’t know what I expect. For him to tear me off the bar and rush me out of the saloon, probably.

Instead, he slips two fingers between his teeth and whistles.

“Hey!” The music stops as Cal points directly at me. “Don’t you all know who that girl is?”

My heart thuds in my chest.

Cal stares back at me and something passes between us.

I’d forgotten. Cal could be sweet, but he could be wicked too.

Wicked enough to steal me from my own husband.

Wicked enough to love a woman he saw shoot a man.

And charming enough to convince a group of strangers to do the same.

“That there is the most famous singer in all the Wild West!” he shouts, grinning. And with a single wink, he kills the quivering girl in the poster. The girl who agreed to be Reginald’s bride. His Alice. The girl he’d sworn to protect. And finally I understand what Cal is doing. He is hiding me by refusing to hide me at all.

Clever, my Cal.

“What’s your name?” someone shouts.

And so I finally give my devil her due. I let my shadow stand in the light and I give her a name.

It is the name of a performer.

Of a woman whose voice is clear and true and who rules herself.

“Belle,” I say. “Belle King.”

The crowd cheers, calling out for a song, as Cal raises his glass to me—proud to claim the wildest thing in the bar.

And silently I answer the question he asked so long ago.

It is an answer that surprises me and my shadow both.

Yes, I say. Yes, I could love you.

33

Fates and Fury

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

Stitch by stitch, I sew the final seams of the dress in which I will hang.

Perhaps it is one that I was always fated to wear.

Shakespeare’s stories weren’t the only ones Ama knew. She had a thousand others. When she was a little girl, her father sent her to live in a convent in Mexico City. He was a military man too busy for the rebellious daughter of a dead wife, and so he chose, instead, to simply lock his daughter away.

Ama hated that convent.

But she loved its forbidden books.

“I got bored of the Bible my first year, so I started sneaking into the priest’s quarters. He had a whole library to himself, books we weren’t allowed to read.” Her eyes took on a shiny, far-off look. “Those stories were better than prayers. They gave me a way out.”

And when she ran away, lugging the stolen collection of Shakespeare with her, Ama also kept the other stories, locked deep in her head.

Some nights, if we were very good, she would tell us one.

There was one she saved especially for me.

“Since you’re such a clever seamstress,” she said as I mended her performance gown.

I blushed at her praise. “My mother was a seamstress. I just sew.”

“There were some damned powerful women who ‘just sewed,’ ” Ama said. “These three were sisters. The Moirai, the Greeks called them. Fates.”

“Maybe we should put them into our show.” I laughed, still sewing.

“Maybe we should.” But she was not laughing. “Clothos was the first sister. She wove the thread of life while man was still in the womb. She determined his destiny. Lachesis was the second sister. She measured the thread to determine the length of that life. And Atropos was the third sister. She cut the thread, deciding how each man would die.”

“Powerful seamstresses indeed.” I smiled.

“You don’t know how powerful.” Ama shook her head. “Above the gods, even.” And there was something about her face that gave me pause. “What I’m saying is that there is destiny, Alice. That there are things for men to decide and things for the gods. And you can’t try to change the two.”

Now, years later, as I finish the final hem, I wonder if what she said was true. If my story—Cal’s story and the story of the Damned—was determined before I was ever born. If the Moirai determined our fate, drawing out our thread only to cut it.

Stitch.

Stitch.

Stitch.

Maybe.

But I preferred the Furies.

And in the darkness of my cell, where I fold my finished dress and lay it on my pillow, I place an offering beneath it.

The feather from Cal’s raven and a glass—crushed beneath my heel into a dozen glittering pieces.

34

Danger

Two Years Prior

Fort Worth, Texas

There is the rest of the world, and there are the Damned.

The Damned make life a celebration. We are young and sweet and sometimes cruel.

The world wants us dead, and all we want to do is live.

So we live.

After Deadwood we stop running and follow the hangings instead. It’s Cal’s idea, born from that night in Deadwood.

“We’re going to hide where that man won’t ever find you,” he tells me, grinning. “Right in plain sight.”

Because Reginald is not looking for Belle. He is looking for Alice.

We begin to develop a reputation. A following. People no longer just come to see hangings; they come to see us.

They come to see Belle.

And it’s Belle who sings and Belle who starts dancing for money at the little bars and saloons in the towns we creep through. Ama dances too, in her own way, which is to music that is entirely in her head. Sometimes we take our clothes off to dance in our slips, and sometimes we leave them on, and the funny thing is, it doesn’t matter either way. Not the way it should. People pay just to be near us. To be near the Damned.

Soon the crowds get too big and we move the shows away from the jails and bars and out to wherever camp is for that night.

Dom is the barker, with her jokes and her catcalls. Folks like to see a woman with a rough tongue. Sometimes she’ll shoot her guns into the crowd, picking cards off people’s heads, and they like that too. She never misses. When it turns night, we light a bonfire and the fire-eaters who’ve joined us thrust their sticks into it and then eat them. Uri and Boris tumble around the crowd and sing folk songs.

And for the finale, Cal summons his birds. We name the show “Icarus.” The story of the boy who flies too close to the sun.

He calls his ravens to me, and I wear them like a coat on wings that Cash makes me. Cash with his delicate hands, which no longer just whittle but now build stages, coffins, all manner of things.

My wings are glorious, tall as me and covered in black feathers. Cal has attached a nearly invisible stage rope made of silk that is strong enough to make them flap when I pull a string. And then I fly, just as Cal taught me in Deadwood.

Cal’s birds lift me ever so slightly. And for those few seconds, I am a bird too.

And as the audience watches, they fly with me.

And then, like Icarus, the ravens let me fall.

—

“I lied to you.”

We are sitting on a blanket in the grass somewhere in the Wyoming Territory when he tells me. We’re making our way south toward the larger mining towns of Colorado.

It is June, and overhead the sun is bright and full. Scorching.

Behind us is a farmer’s field fenced with crumbling wood. A single bull grazes lazily inside.

Cal explains that the bulls have to be kept apart from each other or they will fight.

And kept away from the heifers too—even the ones they’ve sired—or they will try to breed.

And so the bull watches us, pacing back and forth, his gold eyes lazily flicking in our direction. But it’s his muscles that I can’t stop staring at—the rippling power beneath his slick black hide, kept contained, just barely, by the fence, which shakes each time he rubs against it.

My stage makeup from last night’s hanging in Laramie City still lingers—bright red lips and rouged cheeks. Cal wipes the remnants gently away. He says he loves to watch Belle perform, but he loves finding me underneath even more.

“You don’t need any of it,” he tells me, reaching up to take the tortoiseshell comb from my carefully piled hair, styled with Ama’s clever hands. “I love you best when you’re just yourself.”

It worries him when I sing. That Reginald will find us, yes, but at least onstage he can see the man coming. Better to be in sight.

No, there is something more.

It frightens him when, even offstage, I twist my hips and raise my voice to banter with the crowd.

Cal says all that frosting will make the men want to eat me all up like bad wolves in one of those fairy tales Ama likes to tell.

That I am almost asking them to.

And so he wipes the makeup gently away.

Sucks the color from my lips.

Licks the black smudges of kohl beneath my eyes.

Unwraps my bright stage dress like a package to find the prize inside.

And when all of Belle is gone, he presses me close to him and tells me how beautiful his Alice is. How perfect. As if he is washing away Belle and revealing the real girl underneath, like a newly harvested pearl.

The treasure he has sworn to protect. That fate has brought him.

But not now.

Now he is telling me that he has lied.

A shadow passes the sun, but it is only one of Cal’s birds.

“About what?” I prop myself up on my elbow and ready myself for the truth. My heart pitter-patters with fear.

He has never loved me.

He does not want me.

He regrets it all. Everything. Me.

“About my mother.” Cal pulls his legs up to his bare chest. He wears only jeans and his cowboy hat, and his muscles, though smaller and cloaked in bare skin, are as strong as those of the bull.

“Your mother?” I am so unprepared for the answer, so relieved, that I let out a big sigh of breath. Scooting closer, I take his hand. “What do you mean?”

Behind us, the bull snorts, pawing at the ground. It is a lazy sound, full of something he can’t say or do. Energy waiting to be released.

Cal ducks his head, and I reach up and lift off his hat. I place a hand beneath his chin and lift it up so that I can see his eyes. “What do you mean, Cal?”

“She left me.” He is crying. Not much. Just a few salty drops, but they are enough to shake me. Because Cal does not cry. He whoops and whistles and laughs.

I wipe the tears with the back of my hand. Lay it against his chest. “Oh, Cal. I’m so sorry. But she can’t help death.”

He pulls away. And for a second I am angry. I am trying so hard, doing everything right, and somehow it’s not enough.

“She didn’t die,” Cal says, his voice bitter. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That was a lie. She left my father. Left me. When I was just a baby.”

“But…why?” It is the only thing I can think to say.

It is the wrong thing.

He stands up, shaking his shoulders as if trying to shake off the weight. “Me, Alice!” He pounds his chest with his fist. “Me. She left because of me.”

“Why would she do that?” I shake my head, trying and failing to understand.

He is pacing now, and behind the fence the bull begins to pace too.

“I was just a baby. Two years old.” His pacing quickens. “She just didn’t want to be a mother anymore.”

His shoulders shake in a dry heave. The tears are gone. This is beyond that.

This is anger.

“Maybe it wasn’t about you,” I say softly. “Maybe it was only about her.”

We are being honest.

And so I am honest too.

For the first time, I let him see my shadow in the daylight. I kiss him hard, the way that I have wanted him to kiss me, like that first night, not the chaste pecks since. I push him onto the blanket and straddle the whole of his body.

Then I lick the salty trail of tears from his face with my tongue and let it circle the sticky taste of his lips before shoving my tongue inside.

He shivers once.

I move lower and bite his neck.

I am losing myself.

Or finding myself.

Doing all the things my shadow has wanted to do.

Cal bucks beneath me.

I shove him back down and kiss him again.

But then he gently takes hold of my waist and lifts me away. Steadies himself. And for an instant, I feel horribly, utterly embarrassed. Ashamed that I have let myself go.

Cal takes my hand, gently, and presses it to his heart. He is still trembling. “I love you, Alice.”

My shadow flickers and is gone, swallowed by the sun.

He says the truth between us out loud for the first time. “I’ve given everything for you. I see you onstage when you’re Belle, and you could have anyone. Do anything.” His pauses. “Sometimes it feels like you don’t even need me.” His voice breaks. “You wouldn’t leave me, would you, Alice? Not like her?”

And before I can answer, the bull breaks through the wooden fence and charges.

There is but a second to escape, but I cannot move. Cal grabs me and rolls me aside, crushing me beneath him in the grass.

I can feel the heat of the bull’s breath against my neck. Then Cal is up and whooping like a wild man, running straight at the bull.

“Cal!” I scream for him. But he’s already grabbed the red picnic blanket off the ground. He flicks it at the beast, just as its horns lower toward me.

It swerves, following the red.

The commotion draws the rest of the Damned. Dom comes, pistol drawn, and Ama right behind her. Cash has his whittling knife raised in one hand.

But their fear slips away into peals of laughter.

Because Cal does what he always does—he makes it all a show.

Leaping on top of one rickety fence post, he flashes the blanket with his grin, and the bull charges. At the last moment, Cal, the hero, jumps onto its back and rides it away.

Dom is whooping with him now, cheering him on, and the others join in, Ama sticking two fingers between her teeth to whistle.

Across the field they go, the bull trying to buck Cal off and Cal hanging on like a burr.

And I think how beautiful he is. How fearless. How unafraid to be completely himself.

It is Cash who lifts the fallen fence post and sets it straight again, notching the broken log at its cracked end with his pocketknife and moving the posts together back in place.

But still Cal rides. He rides the bull until the creature cannot move. The next day, the farmer will make us pay for the animal—say that Cal has taken the fight out of him. Ruined him for breeding forever.

But in the moment, none of that matters.

In the moment, he is glorious.

By the time the bull limps back, mouth foaming, hide beaded with sweat and Cal perched like a king on top of him, the fence is repaired. Dom gives Cal a hand and helps him hop down to safety on the other side.

Cal comes directly over to me—sweaty, quivering, and eyes wild with triumph. Then he falls to one knee like a knight from some fairy tale and, lifting his head, gives me a lascivious wink.

And finally I laugh too, my earlier embarrassment forgotten as Cal swoops me off the ground and swings me in a great, wide circle that sends the skirt of my slip billowing.

And when he sets me back down, he does so very carefully. Holds me close a second too long.

His head burrows against my neck, and I feel the tickle of his sweet breath still scented with oranges from our picnic as he presses his chest against my still-fast-beating heart.

“I know you, Alice, better than anyone.”

It is almost like he is talking to himself.

And the next day he gives me a tiger.

35

First Blood

Two Years Prior

Ellsworth, Kansas

To dance with a tiger, you need more than bravery.

You need skill. Luck.

And most of all, you need the permission of the tiger.

Because a tiger can never be made to do what they do not want.

At least not for long.

Two months after Cal gives me Omisha, we are in Kansas when we hear of a hanging to happen in Las Vegas, New Mexico. It is for a girl named Paula Angel.

She is only a poor girl of nineteen, while the man she is accused of killing is a married father of five and from a prominent family.

Paula says she is innocent.

But she is young and disposable, and the man, at least according to the law, is not. The truth is the town wants her blood. They want to punish her for not fitting the mold of what a girl should be, whether she killed him or not.

There is nothing I can do to save her. Nothing anyone can do.

And they are not even going to build her gallows, according to the excited cowboy who tells us. The dead man’s family has insisted that no more money is to be spent on the woman who’s stolen their son. Instead, they are going to hang her from a cottonwood tree next month. The town is pretending that this delay is to give her time to appeal her conviction, but the cowboy says everybody knows better. The town and its hungry businesses know a good thing when they see it. People will come from a hundred miles away to watch a woman hang.

They are just waiting for the vultures to gather.

And there will be many. Crowds bigger than the Damned has ever seen.

But that is not why I want to go.

Paula Angel’s treatment is ignoble. Unjust, even if she did commit the crime. She has become a spectacle just because she is a woman. And so I’ve become obsessed with giving her a proper send-off.

I want to dance with Omisha at her hanging.

For this to be our first public performance.

I want Paula to know that I am there, that she is not alone.

But we’ll have to hurry. Cal’s devil-may-care route has led us across the country these past few months on a zigzagging path of hangings from the Dakotas to Colorado to Kansas. On a map, our trail is a looping mess of stitches that double back on themselves and spread too far. Any seamstress knows it cannot hold.

Yet somewhere, in the middle of it all, I make him a promise that I hope will.

Now, to reach Paula Angel in time, we must make a straight line, pausing only for a few single-night hangings in between.

I spend all my time not traveling or performing with Omisha, trying to teach her to dance.

If Omisha is to trust me, there can be no hidden parts between us.

She must know who I am in my entirety.

And so each morning, while the rest of the camp sleeps, I take my tiger far away so that no one can hear us, and then I sing.

Loud and long and without anybody to please with my voice but myself.

It is a glorious thing to please yourself. Girls are not taught how to do it enough. There is always someone else our love is directed at, someone else we use our talents for. An external presence that we allow to accept or deny our gifts.

Our beauty.

But tigers do not care about such things.

And in those moments when I dance and sing with only a beast watching, the parts I love the most are the parts that no one else wants. The ones that I have tried so very hard to pretend do not exist.

The crack in my voice as I miss a high note, the way I break during the climb before finally hitting the pitch.

The wide spread of my hands, too big for a girl, disguised when I dance on a stage by assuming a dancer’s trick of hiding my thumb and middle finger as if they are kissing.

Not here, though. Here, on the open prairie, I spread them wide, let them reach for the sky, bury themselves in the earth, spread the mud and muck I find over my clean skin.

And I love it all.

The boniness of my knobby knees, the way my lips never fully cover my teeth even when they are closed.

The selfish belief that I am the only thing in this world that matters.

The greed of it all.

Omisha loves it too. She chuffs beside me, then rises to stalk the grass for prairie grouse. Sometimes she sings with me, her roar loud and indescribable. Filled with power.

It is the most remarkable thing I’ve ever heard.

Once, I even let her off her leash, and for a heart-stopping moment, as her lean lines cut across the tall grass, I think that she will disappear forever.

That maybe it would be better for her if she did.

But a few minutes later, she returns with a grin in her eyes and blood dripping from her lips.

When she flops down beside me, I stroke her belly and think how wonderful it is to touch something that could kill you. To claim the power of death.

And then I remember that shard of glass that I held to the man in Deadwood. The way his eyes flickered with fear as I took what was mine.

And I smile.

I do not think that I will ever have children, but if I do—if I ever have a little girl, it is the one thing I would wish for her.

This.

The single moment of loving herself fully.

Even—no, especially—the parts nobody else will.

For a little while it is perfect.

Because for a little while, I have them both—the tiger and Cal.

My sunrises and sunsets.

The magic hour in a photograph, or a memory, where the light might be from either one.

My performances, ever wilder and better attended, have become unruly. The men who come growing more insistent in gaining my affections. And Cal has begun to dream of California. His father has a friend there who owns a ranch where the Damned can find work. Where we can save up enough to buy our own home and grow our own oranges, his favorite treat. He begs me night after night to start a new life with him. To settle down somewhere safe. Somewhere I no longer need to be Belle and hide in plain sight and can just be Alice, the girl by his side.

Somewhere he believes Reginald and his posters will never find me.

And so to keep him from asking me again, I tell him that I will. That I just want one last performance—the one for Paula Angel.

One dance with a tiger.

And for that I’ll give him a promise—a vow, really. One I never intended to make again. But sometimes to gain something, you first have to give something away. One future for another. A promise for a dance.

Only Omisha does not ask me to give up who I am. If anything, she demands that I become more of myself.

Each day that we work together, I feel myself growing. Taking on a bit of her essence.

Sometimes it’s almost like looking in a mirror.

“Careful, Alice,” Cal admonishes me. “If you overwork her, she might snap.”

But he doesn’t understand. Omisha likes it just as much as I do.

We operate under a simple system of discipline and rewards.

A pet on the head for obeying an easy command. A piece of raw meat for doing something harder. A tiger must eat all parts of a killed animal—brain, hair, stomach, organs—to keep their digestive system in order.

“Sit,” I tell her, and then toss her the head of a jackrabbit when she does. She eats it, skull and all.

It is a wondrous thing to watch a tiger sit. She looks at me with her great, glowing eyes, and she doesn’t so much as plop herself down like a normal animal as carefully place herself on the earth, one haunch at a time, like a lady sitting down to a fine meal.

I catch my breath.

“You have the same color eyes,” Cal tells me, not for the first time. “You even move the same way.”

It’s not true. Omisha is far more graceful than me. And my eyes are a honey yellow. Omisha’s are electric gold.

Like my mother’s used to be.

I think of my mother often as I work with the tiger. Because sometimes, looking into Omisha’s eyes, it really is like I can see her too. Everything in her that was extinguished when she died. Everything she could have been that the world would not let her be.

And I wonder, as I lift a piece of meat high above Omisha’s head, dangling it from a small step stool that Cash has crafted for me, if what I’m doing is right.

If by teaching her to obey me, I am killing a part of her too.

I’ve begun to let her follow me around without her chain. She does not try to run.

“Nuh-uh,” Ama says. “I’m not going anywhere near that damned beast if you don’t have a leash on her.”

“She won’t hurt you,” I promise. But I don’t actually know if that’s true. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Wondering what she will do next. What she is capable of.

It’s why dancing with her in front of a crowd will be so thrilling.

The power of us combined.

Two weeks before Paula Angel’s hanging, Cal waits for me to finish the day’s training. I tell him not to. I say we are going to work well into dark so that he will go to bed before I’m finished. So that he will leave me alone.

Because tonight I am not quite ready to be Alice. Tonight I want to be Belle just a little bit longer.

Omisha and I work until midnight. And there, just before the end, it finally happens.

We’re both tired. But I can see something in her eyes that tells me that she’s ready. It’s almost like she’s asking.

And so I set aside the bucket of meat I have for her and approach her without it. Her eyes light up in the desert moon’s glow.

And slowly, oh-so slowly, I raise my hand.

Omisha rises.

If you have never seen a tiger move, it is almost impossible to describe it. They don’t move like other beasts of flesh and bone.

They move like liquid, like heat. Omisha rises like a reversed ray of sunshine, not falling to the earth but rising from it to meet its source.

Her paws are on my shoulders. Our eyes connect.

I move my right foot, and she moves her paw.

Then the left. We turn in a circle, and then there is the sound of a gunshot in the distance. Dom practicing for the show, probably, but I am not prepared for it.

My eyes dart toward the sound, just for an instant.

It is enough. Omisha falls away from me, and as she does, her right claw slices my shoulder.

Hissing, I reach up. Blood wells through my hand.

I watch Omisha’s eyes dilate. Her nose quivers at the scent of blood.

It takes every bit of courage I have to approach her again. To put the leash around her neck and lead her to her cage.

But in that moment I’m no longer thinking about the dance.

I’m thinking about the blood and what my shadow would say.

Let him come, let him come, let him come…

Because I’m not just a girl anymore. I’m a girl with a tiger.

And then Cal is there. “What happened?” He grabs my arm worriedly, eyes widening at the wound. “Jesus, Alice. You’re hurt.”

“It’s just a scratch.” I brush him off, trying to hang on to the thought. The blood…

“Here, let me help you bandage the—”

“No! I said I’m fine.”

I can see the hurt in his expression, but I don’t take the time to apologize.

Going over to Omisha’s cage, I stare at her gold eyes, glowing in the dark.

She stares back.

There isn’t much room in that cage. If someone else went in there, someone Omisha didn’t trust, the tiger would do what tigers do with something that could be food.

Especially if it smells like fear.

Eventually, I go back to my tent, where Cal has fallen asleep waiting. He wakes just long enough to pull me close, my earlier callousness forgiven.

But I don’t sleep.

I lie beneath the blankets, the arm where Omisha scratched me on fire with pain.

Closing my eyes, I catch the trail of blood.

And in that second, it is not my blood, it is his.

One by one, I work through the details of what I could do.

What my shadow wants me to do.

Because what I haven’t told Cal is that I found something today. Something left inside the tent where we performed Sleeping Beauties earlier—a dress. My dress. The one from the asylum.

And I know what that means.

There was always a time, during our nights together, when Reginald would grow tired of just seeing me in another girl’s dress. When he would bring out his insults. The candle.

The knife.

And I always knew that once that happened, the end, whatever horror it might be, was close.

I can feel his hunger now. His eagerness.

A tiger hunts for food.

My husband hunts for fear.

Reginald’s found us.

And he’s ready for the kill.

36

A Letter

Kansas

Dear Mary Parker,

I am alive.

Sincerely,

Belle King

37

Little Deaths

Two Years Prior

Kansas

It was Ama who taught me about death.

Just before we cross through Oklahoma and then enter New Mexico to bear witness to the death of an angel, we perch on the edge of Kansas a final night, like deep-sea divers taking our last breaths before plunging from a cliff.

And we are in an ocean.

The tall grasses of the southwestern edge of this state, still untouched by settlers, rise as high as my shoulders, surrounding us so that we are in a sea of yellow. It is surreally beautiful. We lose ourselves inside it. Drown in its cover.

Cal leads up a game of tag that sends the Damned chasing one another like a school of fish. It is delightful and wonderful, and by its end, we collapse, exhausted, in the joy of one another’s company.

Now, though, it is just us girls—Dom, Ama, and me. We’ve left the others behind to bathe in a small stream.

I’ve brought Omisha with me, looping her chain around a tree but giving her enough lead to access the water.

She surprises us all by immediately plunging in. And so we shriek and laugh and take our baths with a tiger. And when we are finished, we emerge reborn, dripping wet, to dry ourselves on the bank, spreading across a blanket and letting the evening’s cool breeze lick us dry.

Ama, as always, has brought her book of Shakespeare and, at Dom’s request, begins to read us a story.

It is a scene from Romeo and Juliet, but Dom stops her as soon as she starts.

“I’d think you’d hate this play,” she teases. “Too sentimental. Too full of flowery promises and love.”

“Sentimental?” Ama shakes her head. “Hah. Shakespeare was a dirty bastard. All his plays have double meanings. The length of a man’s wit is really the length of his penis. And a woman’s sweet nothing is the part of her that could hold it.” She grins. “Even here, when he talks about dying, he’s really talking about sex.”

“I don’t see how.” Dom frowns. I know that she secretly loves Romeo and Juliet. That this is the real reason Ama has chosen it to read now. But, Ama being Ama, she can’t help herself from a little fun.

“Right here.” Ama pounds the text. “Romeo must go and live or stay and die.”

“Because of the Capulets,” Dom allows. “They’ll cut his head off if they find him with Juliet.”

“Sure,” Ama says. “But that’s not all he means.” She waits until we are hanging on her every word. “If he stays with Juliet, he will die, one way or another. Except one of the deaths is a kind he craves. La petite mort, in French. It means to lose all consciousness for a few brief seconds. And how,” she asks, staring at Dom, “might staying in Juliet’s bed make him do that?”

Dom blushes clean to her roots.

“The little death,” Ama concludes. “An orgasm. A pleasure so great it makes you briefly die.”

Dom refuses to believe it. “You’re taking things too far, Ama,” she chides. “It’s a love story. That’s enough. You ain’t got to spoil it with filth.”

“Be careful who you’re calling filthy,” Ama taunts. “Or I just might have to kill you.”

Poor Dom has no words to answer this—only a smile she tries to hide—and so, Ama, taking mercy, reads us another example of la petite mort. Juliet begging for the night to give her Romeo and then cut his face out in little stars after he dies.

Ama stops reading. “Say, we could perform that part.” Her eyes grow bright in the dusk.

“Let the audience in on the joke. God, they’d love it! What do you think, Dom?”

I expect Dom to refuse, but instead, I can see her slowly turning the idea over in her head. “Cash could build you a balcony,” she says. “A little one that you can hang out of, way up high…”

“Half-clothed, of course,” Ama says.

“Maybe,” Dom says. “But at least this way none of those men can reach you.”

And I understand now why she is even entertaining this idea. It is another way to put our bodies—Ama’s especially—out of harm’s way. A coffin or the heavens, it seems, are the only ways to escape.

“What do you think, Alice? Want to take turns playing Juliet?” Ama asks, winking.

I hesitate. A firefly—the first of the night—blinks onto the horizon and then buzzes quickly away.

“I promised Cal. This hanging, my performance with Omisha, it’s supposed to be my last one.”

I see Dom and Ama exchange a look. “That’s right. Guess we forgot.”

“But this is the end of it for all of us, isn’t it?” I say, confused. “We’re going to work in California on that friend of his father’s ranch.”

There are several beats of silence. “I don’t think so,” Ama finally answers. “I loved working on the ranch with Cal’s father, but that was another place. Another time. I want something more now.” Her voice quickens. “There are so many stories out there, Alice. I want to collect them. Write some of them, maybe. Hell, I want to know my own story better. My grandmother was Cherokee, did you know that?”

I shake my head.

“Well, she was. My father, his grandparents came from Spain. There’s stories there too. A whole world of stories, and if I don’t claim them, write them down, maybe nobody will.”

Dom’s eyes shine with admiration. “And you?” I say to her. “Dom, you love ranching. Don’t you want to go back to work?”

But I know before she even answers that she’ll follow Ama wherever she goes. That she will probably just make up an excuse now to do so.

Except she surprises me with her answer. “Rodeos,” she says. “I want to do rodeos. Bareback riding, barrel racing. Go up against the boys. I can ride a horse better than any of them.”

Which is true, she can.

“And maybe some sharpshooting too,” she allows. “Like Annie Oakley. I can travel around with the Damned, perform some of the time, then leave to ride rodeos when we’re close. Hell, eventually maybe I’ll even help Ama open up a theater. That way we can both perform when we want and where we want. Cash said he’d help build it.”

I can’t stop the small shot of pain I feel.

Because all this time I thought that the Damned was us—me and Cal. That it was because I sang the night of that hanged man’s death that we’d begun at all. And that when we left, the rest of it would simply stop. But of course that is not true. Has never been true. If we leave, they will simply go on.

“Dom,” I say, “I had no idea you wanted to perform.”

She shrugs. “When I was a little girl, my daddy wouldn’t even let me ride a horse unless it was sidesaddle. It was bullshit,” she says, then looks embarrassed. “Excuse my cursing. I just want more, that’s all.”

Ama looks at me pointedly. “And you, Alice. What do you want to do? You want to go keep house on a ranch?”

Omisha pulls herself from the river’s mud and crawls onto the bank. She looks primal, her eyes glowing with the same brightness as the emerging fireflies in the dark.

I look away.

“Not the ranch, maybe,” I say, keeping my voice light. “But I have what I want. Omisha. Cal.”

“Cal?” Ama says quietly. “That’s all you want? A tiger to parade around and Cal to love you?”

“Do you think he doesn’t?” I can hardly speak the question. Across from me on the blanket, Dom and Ama look like ghosts, their white underclothes washed in moonlight. Like something out of one of Shakespeare’s plays come to question my sanity. My fate.

“I think that’s not the point,” Ama answers.

Her words feel like the loosening of a corset.

“That’s right,” Dom says. “Listen, Cal’s like a brother to me. But I don’t think the question is whether he can love you enough. The question is whether he can learn to love himself.”

My throat grows dry. There is truth to her words, a truth I have not quite been able to articulate. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that Cal is always trying to do something, prove something. To help an animal. A person. To convince you life is big and grand and to look out at all the possibilities. But I think, sometimes, doing that is just a way to avoid looking in at himself. Like making a fun-house mirror so everything is strange and exciting, but you can’t really see your true reflection. Cal don’t never want to look too closely at what he wants. Who he is.” She hesitates before continuing. “Until he can learn to live for himself, how can he really love anybody else?”

I flinch.

“Love isn’t saving someone,” Ama says. “It’s letting them be.” Her eyes meet Dom’s in the dark. “And if you can’t do that, then how can they ever make the choice to stay?”

I look at the two of them, sitting across from me on a riverbank in the middle of nowhere. Explorers in an ocean of grass. And I think there is nowhere else right now in this whole goddamned country I would rather be than here. Seated beside girls with dreams so big that they need a world to hold them. Not a classroom. Or a boarding school. Or a house.

And I know, in that moment, it isn’t just Cal and Omisha I love. I love them too. The Damned. Who they are. Who they let me be.

And so for the first time, I tell them what I can hardly admit to myself.

“I don’t think I deserve what I want,” I say, my words so quiet, I hope they cannot hear me. “I’ve done too many bad things.”

But Dom surprises me by laughing. “You too? Aw, hell, honey. We’ve all done bad things. When I met Ama, I cut her pigtail off while she was sleeping because she pissed me off so badly.”

“And I spit in your food,” Ama says.

Dom looks at her in disbelief, crossing her arms. “You never told me that.”

“Well, now you know. And if you ain’t nice, I might just do it again.”

They are trying to make me feel better with their confessions of small sins. And I could just let them. But I don’t. “I’ve done worse.” I choke out the words. “Far worse. I’ve killed a man.”

I expect them to run. To get up and leave me right away.

“You ain’t the only one,” Dom says softly, and now her voice is dead serious. “That man who fell off into the pigs? Who do you think pushed him?”

I cannot think how to answer.

Ama speaks before I can. “And I slapped a nun. Right across the face. A nice one too. She was only trying to help me, and I hurt her pretty bad. Broke her tooth.” She bows her head. “It was just after I came to the convent. I was scared. Angry too.”

“You had a right to be,” Dom says.

“Maybe,” Ama says. “But I still regret hurting her.”

“But, see, you feel bad!” I try to make them understand. “Me…I think about killing that man in Kentucky all the time.” I stare at their faces. They wait for me to go on. “There are times I’ve wanted to do it again. There’s a part of me that thinks maybe I will. A…dark part.”

I wait for their condemnation.

“Well,” Ama says matter-of-factly, “if you’re going to do something wicked, you might as well enjoy it.”

Dom’s grin is fierce. “I know I did.”

And there, in the flicker of the moon as it emerges from the clouds, our shadows dance together.

A year from now, I will remember this night, and I will use it onstage.

This—not Reginald’s forced voice trainings nor my skill at passing for a lady nor my not-so-extraordinary looks—is why all the men who come to watch my performances will love me.

I will give them what no one else does. I will give them a piece of this night.

I will show them my shadow, and I will let them show me theirs.

When I step onto the raised platform of an opera house in Florence, the crowd will love me not because I am as beautiful as the statues but because I am not. Because I am flawed. Because my voice breaks in the middle of a song and still I sing. I do it staring at the balding man in the front row who is so afraid of imperfection he has worn a toupee and, lifting it from his head, kiss his bare skin.

And when I turn circles in the crowd of women perfectly coiffed in their Parisian seats that cost hundreds, I will do so with the small rolls of extra flesh on my hips exposed. I will do so without makeup over the blemishes on my skin. And as I lift the prettiest one onstage to join me, I will take away her perfectly drawn-on lips with a kiss from a mouth that has, this very morning, scolded her child to tears over nothing but for daring to still be young, and she will love me too.

And when I return her to the seat beside her waiting husband and spit on his face, he will love me more.

When I dance with a tiger in front of the jail of a woman who has killed, I will do it as someone who has done the same. I will dare those who are there to watch her hang to throw the first stone.

And when they don’t, when they wish, just for a moment, that they were me instead, I will gather their stones, each and every one, and let them see what they might be if only they were not afraid.

I will look down at them from the stage and they will look back and we will see each other whole.

Shadows and all.

And that, in its own way, is a death. A small death of the person we show the world.

For an instant, there on the banks of the river, I understand all of it—can see a glimpse of all the things that are yet to come.

And then it is gone.

And I am just a girl, alone, with two friends who are not afraid to see me, and the relief is so great I feel myself begin to weep.

Dom hugs me, and then, as if sensing I can only take so much affection at once, Ama returns to discussing Shakespeare. “The problem with building a balcony,” she says, “is that there never really was one. Not in the actual play.”

“Sure there was!” Dom is indignant. “I saw a production of it once. Juliet practically fell out of the damned thing when somebody moved the set piece she was standing on.”

“It’s only a window in the play,” Ama says. “Just a window. No balcony.”

I leave them to their debate and go down to the bank to join Omisha. To let her presence steady me as it always does. Asking her permission, I lift my hand to her nose and let her sniff me. She gives it, nuzzling my hand before lowering her head so that I can pet her.

What am I going to do with a tiger on a ranch?

Ama’s words from earlier haunt me as I think of my promise to Cal.

Death. La petite mort—the little death.

I told him that I would never leave him. That only death could keep us apart.

But we have already killed each other a hundred times, have we not?

And we mean to continue doing it, stealing slices of each other’s souls one night at a time for the rest of our lives.

But when you die that many times—when you let someone have the power to kill you over and over again—then how can you ever really live?

Omisha lifts her head, pressing into me, and I lean down to bury my face in her fur. She could kill me in an instant. Not a little death, the big one. The kind, like a hanging, that cannot be undone. That has no other meaning.

And yet she does not. Is this love?

Or have I killed a part of her too?

“What do you want, girl?” I ask her, whispering in her ear.

But she cannot answer. And only her shadow, thrown against the water’s flickering silver by the moon, moves at all.

38

The Dance

Two Years Prior

Las Vegas, New Mexico

I spend the night before my final court appearance awake, sitting upon the edge of my cot in my new dress, waiting.

Fear squeezes my heart each time I hear a sound. He came for me once before. Drew closer than I ever meant him to be. And law be damned, he might find a way to come for me again.

So I sink into those last hours before in Las Vegas once more—searching for a thread to pull on that could change everything.

Near Paula Angel’s jail cell in Las Vegas, I stand in my dressing tent, putting the finishing touches on my makeup. Because it is time.

After all the practice and waiting, I am finally going to dance with a tiger.

Outside, the crowd for the hanging waits with bated breath, tantalized by the sight of Omisha pacing in her cage, which Cash has rolled onto the stage.

All that is left is for me to join her.

The tent flap swings open.

“What’s this?” Cal’s face is once again awash with emotion. One that I cannot read but that looks very close to anger. In his hand he is holding something white.

“What is this, Alice? I found it folded up outside your tent.”

There is no reason for him to be worried. No reason for him to know what it is. Though he does know the stories of Reginald’s cruelty.

“Nothing.” I grab the dress from him. “Just a dress.”

“Whose?”

I laugh. Or try to laugh. “Mine, silly. Who else’s would it be?”

It is not a lie. It is my dress—the one that I wore in the asylum. The one Reginald must have left earlier during Sleeping Beauties. Now moved from where I threw it in a trunk.

I inhale sharply. Because it means that Reginald really is here, today. That he came into this very tent. Stood there. Went through my things. Maybe even crossed paths with me.

All this time running, and the distance between us now is as close as the night I left.

I finger the folds of the dress, the filthy fabric now as pure white as a wedding dress. Bleached and mended and perfectly clean.

“Alice.” Cal looks at me the way he did back in Kansas.

When I made him a promise that I can’t undo. One that made him let me have this dance before the end.

“Please,” he begs. “Tell me the truth.”

And so I do. It is a mistake. I know it even before I can finish my words.

“It’s him. He left it for me.”

Silence. Then, “When?”

I look away, but that tells him all he needs to know.

“We have to go.” His voice is choked as he grabs my hand. His words the ones I knew he’d say. “I mean it this time, Alice. Today. Hiding you in plain sight only works if he doesn’t know. And now he does. We can’t wait any longer.”

“The hanging’s tonight!” I yank my hand back. “And you promised, Cal. One last dance, remember?” He cannot understand my desperation.

“That was before this!” He nods to the dress. “Reginald’s here, Alice! If you dance…”

Very gently, I pull him close.

I feel his body tense with conflicting emotions. Terror and what I hope is love.

Finally, he sinks against me, and I whisper in his ear, “Do you trust me?”

“Of course.” He doesn’t hesitate with his answer.

“Then let me have tonight. One dance. I swear to you that nothing will happen. That I will be safe. Cal.” I pause, unsure of how much to tell him. “I’ll take care of it.”

Confusion ripples across his face. “What are you saying?”

I let him read it in my face.

“No. You don’t have to do it, Alice. That girl…the one who had to do all those horrible things just to stay alive…you don’t need her anymore. I can take care of you. I want to take care of you. If there is something terrible to be done, then let me do it.”

“Cal.” I take his face in my hands. “If you really love me, you’ll let me do this. You’ll let me save myself. Whatever my fate is, I deserve to be the one to decide it. It’s my choice, no matter what Ama’s damned stories say.”

“But…”

The flap swings open again, and I think how unfortunate it is that tents don’t come with locks.

Because this time my visitor is carrying a gun.

“I don’t know what you two think you’re doing, but get that goddamn tiger off the stage.” The police officer’s voice trembles with fury. His thick frame and blue uniform fill the opening. “Are you insane? You can’t let it out near the public! Put that filthy beast away before I shoot it.”

“I heard you.” I stand, fists clenched, searching the tent for something sharp. I glance furtively at my Sleeping Beauties coffin in the corner and wonder if a living man might fit in it.

Or a dead one.

It would be so very easy for Cal to let the officer stop me. Instead, he surprises me by stepping forward.

“Here, Officer. Let me help.”

He is his most charming self today. For the Damned’s performance he is dressed as a general who uses his birds in battle, and so he has outfitted himself in a splendid uniform of crimson and brass with a single raven perched on his shoulder. He looks regal. Powerful. But his good-natured smile as he takes off his top hat breaks the illusion. It also acknowledges the man in the real uniform as the one in charge.

“I’m Cal,” he says, with an easy smile. “Cal Murphy.” The last name is for the benefit of the officer, who is clearly Irish and not too long in this country, judging by his brogue.

The police officer hesitates before offering his own. “Stephen Kelly,” the officer says.

“It’s an honor,” Cal says, sounding sincere. “Truly an honor that you would take the time to check on our little show. Thank you.” He shakes his head. “We understand you’re hanging a dangerous criminal today.”

I wonder what exactly he is doing. But I’ve known Cal long enough to know that I can trust him. That if he has made me a promise, he will keep it—no matter the cost.

“That’s right.” Officer Kelly stands a bit straighter. “And we don’t have time for no more trouble. Now get that goddamn tiger off the stage.”

“Of course, of course. But first…” Cal removes a small flask from his pocket and waves it at the officer before pulling a wooden crate from outside the tent and wiping it off with his hand, presenting it to the cop as graciously as a butler at a dinner table. Preening a little, the officer accepts.

“There’s nothing we want less than to cause you more trouble.” Cal takes a mason jar from beside the water jug in the corner, fills it to the brim with what’s in the flask, offering him a drink. “Here you are, sir. John Jameson’s finest, straight from Dublin.”

I know for a fact it is no such thing, but the officer clearly does not. “Ah,” he says, smacking his lips. “Tastes just like the homeland.”

“That it does.” Cal squats in front of him, and now, I notice, his own voice is tinged with an Irish brogue.

Clever, my Cal. Can convince anyone of anything.

“The thing is, sir, at the Carnival of the Damned we take safety seriously. Very seriously.” He nods gravely. “And Belle here, she’s trained that tiger real good. It’s as sweet as a house cat.” He waits for the officer to take another drink. “I can guarantee you there will be no issues. In fact, I give you my word.”

“Ha.” The officer takes another gulp. “Your word. If I could tell you the number of times—”

“I hear you, sir.” Cal cuts off the man’s protest, holding up his hands. “I absolutely do. Which is why I want to give you more than that.” He makes a show of pulling a pen and paper out of his performer’s jacket and then spends the next several seconds writing intensely.

“Here.” He holds the paper out, his signature scrawled across the bottom, and then he whistles. The raven lifts from his shoulder and delicately plucks the paper from his hand, carrying it to the officer in a display of showmanship. The officer can’t help but look impressed.

“That there is a contract,” Cal says.

“A contract?” The officer sounds amused, his mood no doubt helped by the raven and the whiskey.

“A contract.” Cal nods. “It states that if anything goes wrong…which,” he adds quickly, seeing the officer’s frown, “I assure you it will not. But if it does, I promise you to turn myself in to the law and make full restitution.” He grins. “You can lock me up for life.”

Officer Kelly drains his glass. “That still sounds like you asking me to take your word.”

“It does, it does,” Cal says, clapping the officer on his back as if they’re old friends. “Smart man.” And I realize that with just this single touch Cal has moved them from beyond officer and criminal to boys having a talk. “I’d expect no less of you, Stephen.”

The cop’s whiskey-glazed eyes sparkle.

“Which is why, if you read the rest of the contract, you’ll see I’ve also given you collateral.”

“Collateral?” Officer Kelly frowns, and I know immediately that he doesn’t understand the meaning of the word.

“That’s right.” Cal nods. “Collateral. A pledge of security. This here entire carnival. Tents, animals—and most importantly the sum total of its earned revenue—are yours if that there tiger harms so much as a hair on a single soul’s head and I don’t turn myself in.”

“Cal!” I start to protest, but he holds up his hand and I let him go on.

“You want to give me your circus?” The officer squints.

“No! I most certainly do not. Which is why you know you can trust me.”

Cal splashes a little more whiskey into the officer’s tumbler. Outside, I can hear the crowd’s eager shouts. “What do you say?”

“I say yes.” Officer Kelly assumes a wobbly stance. “Why the hell not? A circus or a dead man. It’s all the same to me.”

Cal shakes his hand another few times before showing him out of the tent as grandly as he might escort a leaving dignitary.

When he is gone, I run over and throw my arms around Cal’s neck. “Thank you,” I whisper.

He kisses me.

And for an instant, I want to forget the show and the dress and just stay here forever next to Cal.

But it’s he who pulls away.

Outside, I can hear the audience’s cheers laced with Dom’s catcalls.

“You sure you want to do this?” His face is crumpled with worry.

I run a finger along the freckles across his nose. “I’ve never wanted anything more in my entire life.”

“Then I won’t stop you.” Cal smiles, but there is pain there too, and the crack in his teeth opens a tiny crack in my heart.

“I’ll handle it, Cal. I promise. Just stay away. One hour after the show. That’s all I ask.”

He looks off when he answers, and I guess it’s so I won’t see the fear in his eyes. “I give you my word.”

It will be fine, I promise myself. After all, nothing is going to happen onstage. I just need Reginald to see me there and follow me back to Omisha’s cage.

Cal lets me go. But as I grab the tent flap, he calls out, “Last dance?”

“Last dance,” I promise.

His smile this time is relieved and brilliant. “Good luck, Alice.”

“It’s Belle, but thank you.” I grin.

“Just for one more dance,” he says. “Then I’m taking Alice to California.”

I blow him a kiss before stepping out of the door.

He catches it.

Even over the roar of the crowd I can hear the Gallinas River running. The water is high this year, and it cuts right through the center of town.

I wonder if its gentle rushing has been a comfort to Paula Angel.

I raise my face to her jail cell in the distance and hope that she can see me.

Then, taking a deep breath, I mount the stage.

Omisha is waiting. Beneath us, bodies roll out like a colorful carpet as far as I can see. Hundreds of souls, all waiting for this moment.

You would expect noise from so many people. But let me tell you something. When you have an audience, truly have them in the palm of your hand, they are not loud; they are perfectly quiet. You have them locked into that very still space just before you take a breath, and then you shrink it so that there is nothing left.

For the occasion, Ama suggested that I wear the white diaphanous dress I often wore to sing the final song to the condemned—a gown that makes me look both innocent and angelic. She said it would be the perfect contrast to Omisha’s power. And she was right.

But today I do not want to contrast with her power. I want to feed it.

So when I take the stage, I take it wearing a red leotard I’ve made myself.

I spent hours sewing it. Saving money and then hunting at each place we stopped for the perfect fabric and embellishments.

Onto the skintight garment that covers me like a second skin, I’ve attached beautiful orange and gold sequins. When I move, they catch the light and glitter like fire. I’ve pulled my hair tightly back from my face and twisted it into a pile on top of my head. And on top of that I’ve placed a crown of flames.

Cash made the flames for me, and they are even more magnificent than his wings. The sculpture reaches three feet into the air and is painted so delicately that they look real. It should be heavy, but Cash has made the crown so perfectly, carved the wood so thin that it feels like I am wearing nothing but air.

My feet I have left bare. I want to feel every moment of this. The fear and the fury and the pain of a tiger who has been trapped.

Who gets just one dance to show the world who she is.

Stepping soundlessly across the stage, I release the tiger from her gold-painted cage.

I hear the crowd’s hushed intake of breath.

And somewhere, beneath me, is Reginald.

I stand tall and let him see me in my full power.

And then I forget him entirely.

I am thinking only of this. Of Omisha.

There is nothing to separate us now. Omisha can as easily turn on them as she could turn on me. If she wanted, she could dive into the crowd and choose a man or woman or child and tear out their throat.

But danger is what makes the moment so delicious.

Without danger there is no triumph.

I call to my tiger—and somewhere, in a jail cell, Paula Angel waits to die.

The music starts. The Damned have become quite good musicians since our time on the road. A song comforts a lonely heart, warms a cold bed, and brings life back to a tired body quicker than anything else can.

In the right time and in the right place, a song is love.

A song is a wish.

And the one the Damned begins now was written for just this. And it wasn’t the poet, Cash, or even the reader, Ama, who did it.

It was the rough-and-tumble Dom.

It is a song of wanting. Of an ache so deep that to swallow it back down is to swallow poison. It is a need so big and so hungry that it will feed or kill the person it lives in.

She did not write it for me. She wrote it for Ama. I know that, though Dom never said it.

But in this moment, for this dance, it is mine.

I bow to Omisha, and there is more holiness in this dance, in this feeling, than what I have ever felt in any church or with any human before.

And then we begin.

Omisha takes the first step forward, mimicking a curtsy just the way I have taught her, right front paw tucked under the left.

I nod my acceptance to her request, and in a breathtaking second she rises to her full height, standing on her hind legs.

The crowd gasps. Quietly. Softly. Like a lover.

I go to her, taking the weight of her in my arms.

It is perfect. The setting sun catches on the horizon and ignites us. We are two burning, spinning flames.

And then we are dancing.

For those infinite few seconds, there is nothing more beautiful in the entire world.

I close my eyes and breathe in tiger.

Breathe in happiness.

And then the sun sets, the song ends, and it is over.

My heart sinks as I slide the leash back over Omisha’s neck. Below us, the crowd is going wild, stomping and whistling and cheering. They throw coins on the stage. Roses. I even see a few pieces of cheap jewelry scattered amongst them.

I lead Omisha offstage and toward my tent. Her body is still trembling with adrenaline, as is mine.

Because for us, the show is not over.

I pull the lid off her feeding tub and give her the entire suckling pig inside it, bones and all.

Just enough to whet her appetite.

“That was a great show.”

I spin around to find a man standing there. I am ready.

Reginald. I want it to be Reginald.

But it is not. It is just some man in a cheap suit. One that still has the creases in it from whatever store rack he bought it from.

My heart sinks with disappointment.

He pulls a gold watch from his pocket. Looks at it. “Got a few hours until the hanging yet. Was wondering if you’d like to make a little money with your tiger.”

“I’m sorry.” I turn my back to him coldly. “I’m not interested.”

“What if I gave you this?” Something in his voice makes me spin around. In his hand he holds a large diamond.

“How do I know that’s real?”

“How do you know it’s not?” He laughs. “Naw, I’m just joshing you, girl. Don’t you know who I am?”

I shake my head.

“My name’s Clarence Edwards. My family’s the one whose land they struck oil on not too long ago in Texas.” He grins, though the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “I’ve got more money than God.”

“Is that right?” I look around again for Reginald.

But he is not here. And this man is.

“That’s right.” He nods. “I’ve been following you since that hanging you did three towns back.” His face tightens. “I can’t stop thinking about you, girl.”

“So you want to give me a diamond,” I say, holding out my hand. “Wonderful. Thank you.” I can’t help the spurt of adrenaline that fills me. The closer I get to it, the more that I’m certain it’s real.

He pulls it just out of my reach. “Naw, I’m not gonna give it to you yet. I want something first.”

I should turn around. Walk away or shout for Dom. Tell her to throw this man out. But I don’t. “What do you want for it?”

And then he says the one thing that could make me stay.

“A dance,” he says. “Just one more. You and the tiger, with me as your only audience.”

It’s dangerous. Omisha is still hungry. She is tired. It is too much.

More importantly, I need to be ready for Reginald.

But a few weeks ago, in Kansas, I made Cal a promise. And with this diamond I could buy him the future he so badly wants. A real house. A place to settle down and start a new life.

I don’t dare admit the truth to myself.

That I want the danger more than the diamond.

Because once Reginald is dead, there will be no more dances with a tiger.

No more glass shards held glittering in my hand.

I can’t give it up. Not quite yet.

Just one last dance…

And so I do the one thing I know I should not do.

I say yes.

39

Warning

This is the part where you should not go on.

Close the book.

Because the stitches of fate are already here in my fingertips, itching to be sewn.

And what is done cannot be undone.

Rest in the heartbeat before the memory.

Let me rot in my cell, waiting to hang.

Do not turn the page.

Leave me here. Now. Forever.

In your hearts and your minds, dead.

40

Betrayal

Two Years Prior

Las Vegas, New Mexico

“I’ll do it in there.” I point toward Omisha’s cage, which the stagehands have rolled off and left beside my tent. “Me and the tiger in her cage.” Omisha is hungry, but she would never hurt me. Not on purpose. “You can’t come in, understand?” I pull over a stray chair that someone had been using for setup. “You sit here and watch. Don’t try to get up. Don’t touch.”

“That’s an awful lot of rules for this big of a diamond,” the man says. But already I can tell that I have him. He wants me as much as I want this dance.

“Go on.” I point to the chair. And then I remember all my nights with Reginald, and this time I make it a command. “Sit. Now.”

He does, his face going red with excitement. He’s already started to sweat.

In her cage, Omisha has devoured the suckling pig, but now she is pacing. She is still hungry.

Carefully, I open the door, locking it behind me. “I know, girl. I know. Shh.”

She turns toward me, her eyes glowing in the cage’s shadows.

“How about it, huh?” I hold my hand out to her. “One more dance?”

She comes to me. But it is not a gentle approach. It is not ladylike at all.

Instead, she charges, and I have to steel myself to keep from stepping back.

When she reaches me, she rises.

Her front paws land heavy on my shoulders, and I let out a soft grunt. And I know that this dance will not be like the one on the stage. This is her cage, and she is in charge.

Omisha wants her dessert.

“Easy,” I whisper. But there is a thrill in my voice. I have never put myself at such risk.

Never held something that was such a match for the wildness inside of me.

One step. Two. We begin to dance.

Omisha is panting, her breath heavy and hot on my face. This is enough. It is more than enough. It is everything I ever wanted. Then she bares her teeth.

Saliva leaks from her lips, and her bright gold eyes are trained on me.

“Down,” I say uneasily. “Down, girl.”

“What the hell is this?” The man outside is standing from his chair, and the thrill turns to fear. Surely, he will not be dumb enough to reach inside and provoke her. But even as I think it, I hear his footsteps. “That was no dance. That was way too quick.”

“Down,” I say, desperate now.

Omisha’s claws dig ever so softly into my shoulders. And then sharper. I wince. “Down!” I say again.

And with a huff she lets go. She lands with a thud on all fours, pivoting around and swishing her tail.

The man approaches and peers into the cage, furious. “I gave you a goddamn diamond, girl. The least you can do is finish your dance!”

But then his gaze sweeps over my shoulder and up to the roof of the cage. “My God.” His eyes widen. “Is that a painting? I’ve been to the Sistine Chapel and I swear it don’t hold a candle to this. Say, let me inside to take a look?”

For a second, I think everything will be all right. I will simply unlock the cage and let him step inside—just a foot—while I hold Omisha. The sky will be enough to satisfy him, and then he will leave me alone.

“All right,” I say. “But you need to move carefully and slowly, understand?”

I slip the leash over Omisha’s neck.

“Sure, sure,” he says. And before I can stop him, he has reached through the bars to snatch my keys and unlocked the cage for himself.

I grab the leash and yank Omisha back, though I don’t have time to attach the chain to the wall of her cage.

And in that instant a shadow flickers between the bars outside.

Reginald. I am almost certain it is him. I am so distracted that I nearly lose my grip on Omisha’s leash.

The man with the diamond tries to step farther into the cage, and I see that the sky was just a ruse.

Before I can react, he grabs me, pulling me outside, and as he does, my fingers lose their grasp of the leash.

He slams the cage door closed but does not take the time to lock it, flinging me against the side of Omisha’s cage. His belt is already unbuckled. It is clear what he was doing while I danced.

And now he means to finish.

“If you want your diamond, girl, you got to earn it.” He is panting. He turns me roughly and my cheek slams against the bars.

Inside, I hear Omisha growl. “Stop,” I say. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

I feel the press of him against my back as he rips at my tights, trying to find a way in. “You just shut up and hold still.”

This close I can hear the beating of his heart.

Then a great shape flashes out of the cage.

And she devours him.

One moment he is there, and the next the tiger has knocked him away from me and pinned him to the ground. And as I watch, she opens her mouth and, even as he screams, rips his face off with her teeth.

Now I scream too. Not of fear for him but for her. If someone finds her doing this, they will kill her.

I had meant to hide what she’d do to Reginald inside the cage. Cover the blood with straw. Stuff the silent pieces of whatever horror was left into her feeding buckets and dispose of him well outside of town. But there is no hiding this. It is too messy. Too loud. Killing a man is far different from eating a dead chicken.

“Down!” I scream again. But I am trembling. I cannot move. Omisha takes another meaty bite, tearing away the man’s shoulder.

“Alice!” Cal comes running. He shouldn’t be here. Is not supposed to be here.

He’s promised.

I’d thought his word was his truth. His promise to me as unbreakable as the one I’d made him in the middle of that Kansas prairie not long ago.

But he pauses only an instant when he sees what is happening. And then, with more presence of mind than he should possibly have, he reaches for Omisha’s leash.

With a roar, she turns on him.

He stumbles backward. And just before she can reach him, I find myself. Grabbing the chain, I yank her away.

Her claws, sharp and perfect, slash across his left cheek.

Not deep. Dear God, don’t let it be deep. I pull the chain more tightly.

And then Officer Stephen Kelly rounds the corner, gun drawn. “What’s going on here?”

“Run!” Cal screams at me, taking the leash. His muscles, stronger than mine, still strain with the effort of holding her.

But it is not enough. Her fury knows no bounds. Omisha breaks free.

Her silver chain dangles behind her as she lunges at the policeman and his gun. He fires, but the bullet goes wide, and she is on top of him. He falls to the ground with a scream, his gun skidding across the ground.

I see his fear, and I am glad.

“Run!” Cal shouts again, lunging for the gun. “Hurry, Alice!”

“But what about Omisha?”

She is doing terrible things now to the police officer, who is trying to roll away and screaming.

“I’ll take care of her. Go! If you stay, she’ll only keep trying to protect you.”

And so I run.

Behind me there is the sound of a gunshot, and the screams end. Cal, putting the police officer out of his misery.

Then Cal is behind me and we are both running, the policeman’s gun nowhere in sight. He catches up to me, holding my hand, and it is just like the first time. “Where are we going?” I yell.

He doesn’t answer. He just keeps running, pulling me with him.

And then we reach the cliff. Below us, the water, flooded from rain, thrashes like a living thing.

“You need to find a way down,” Cal says. “Follow the river. Then you can find a place to cross. If you go south, you can make it to the border. Go to Mexico. I’ll send the Damned to you there.”

“What do you mean, ‘you’?”

He looks at me. “You have to keep running, Alice.”

I move away from him and look down at the water. I could jump. End everything here. Now. Never hurt anyone I love ever again.

And then I hear a new voice.

The voice of the man who kept me in a cage for years.

“I think you’d better turn around,” he says.

And when I do, there, finally, is Reginald, his knife pressed to Cal’s neck.

41

How to Kill Your Husband

Two Years Prior

Las Vegas, New Mexico

“Hello, wife.” Reginald pushes his blade deeper, and I can’t tell if he is cutting Cal because there is already so much blood pouring down his face from Omisha’s claws. “Have you added the dress I left you to your trousseau? Because it’s time to come home.”

I stare at the knife.

It is the same one Reginald used on me all those nights of our marriage. The same one he dug into my skin to make me beg.

And suddenly I am furious.

This. This is who killed my mother. This is who stole my life. My freedom.

Not my shadow.

This man. He is the reason everything in my life has gone wrong.

Who told me that I was broken. Dangerous. Who made me think that I needed to be saved at all.

And now he is trying to kill Cal.

“What are you going to do, Reginald? Kill him?” My voice is choked with anger. Omisha and our dance together have not left me. I feel her power coursing through me. Perhaps she is racing toward me even now.

And instead of running away as Cal wanted me to, I do what she would do—I walk toward him. Unafraid.

There is the faintest flicker of hesitation in his eyes before he answers. “Yes.”

I laugh. “What makes you think I’d care?”

Cal flinches. And there is something about the blood on his shirt that gives me pause.

The policeman’s blood or his? So very, very much for a human.

But I keep my eyes trained on Reginald. “You think that I left you just so I could sleep with another man? A boy?” My lip curls into a snarl. “That I would give up my freedom for that?”

“This isn’t freedom.” Reginald scoffs. “Running around. Dancing with a circus? Why, Alice?”

I study him coldly. Use everything I’ve learned from him about hurting someone. About owning them.

“Because it’s better than you.” I let my eyes travel pointedly down his body and do the one thing I know will hurt him most. I laugh. “You can’t give me anything.”

Rage wrinkles his face. I am walking on the knife’s-blade edge of death. I know that. Whatever I do, whatever I say next, will determine if Cal lives or dies.

“That’s not true,” he says. “I can give you everything.”

“Then beg me. Tell me you want me back. Tell me you love me.”

I need to make him say it. He wants me to make him say it. Reginald does not want a woman he can easily control.

It’s why he picked me. I know that now. He saw something in me that night at the card party he wanted to break.

He wants to break it now.

“Please,” he whispers. “I love you. Come back.”

Cal’s eyes are begging me to look at him, but I can’t. Not yet.

“Why should I?” I take another step closer. “After the way you treated me.”

“Things will be different this time,” he says.

“Prove it.” I speak to him like I spoke to the man who asked me to dance with the tiger. The man Omisha ate. “Let that boy go and pay attention to me.”

For a second I don’t think he’ll do it, but then he releases Cal. “Git.” I speak to Cal like I would a dog, still not looking at him.

He steps away slowly, and my heart aches.

“Give me the knife, Reginald. If you really mean it, show me. Hand me the knife and swear you’ll never hurt me again.”

He is not a man who is easily fooled.

Yet I realize something that I had not before. He needs me.

But I never needed him. Not the pain he gave or the money or even the way out of the asylum. All of those things were already mine to take or to leave. My mistake was in thinking they were ever Reginald’s to give at all.

“Here,” he says finally, holding out the knife by its handle. “Take it.”

Gently, I wrap my hand around his and pull the knife away.

“Thank you,” he says, as if a great weight has been lifted. “Thank you, Alice. You have no idea how long I’ve been looking for you. What I’ve done to find you.”

“Shh. It’s all right. I’m here now.”

I open my arms out to him. Behind me I can hear Cal’s quick intake of breath. I pray with everything in me that he won’t do something foolish.

That, unlike before, he will finally trust me long enough to do what I need to do.

What I have wanted to do for so long.

“It’s all right,” I whisper, pulling Reginald close to me. “Everything’s all right.”

“Things will be different now,” he says again. “I swear it, Alice.”

There will be no mistakes this time.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, they will.” And then I plunge the knife into his heart.

He stumbles, hand over the wound. The red that blooms there is the same color as the red that bloomed from my mother’s breast. I watch it spread as, hunching over, Reginald sinks to his knees.

“Alice.” Cal lays a hand on my shoulder. “That’s enough.”

Ignoring him, I bend down. Even now Reginald looks up as if I will save him. But the knife and I start a new dance. The neck, the face, the hands he lifts to protect it. Over and over again, I do to him what he threatened to do to me.

He dies a hundred times, and I watch him do it.

This is for my mother.

This is for the girls in the dresses you bought.

This is for Cal’s father.

And this one? This one is for me.

I plunge the knife a final time into his heart. He is no longer moving. Has not been moving for some time.

Gently, Cal takes the knife from my hand. When I turn to him, there are tears streaming down his cheeks. “It’s all right,” he tells me. “It will be all right, Alice.”

He takes hold of Reginald’s feet and I take his arms, and together we lift him, just as my mother had commanded me to lift the dead preacher so long ago.

And then we throw his body over the cliff, watching it fall into the river below.

“Let’s go,” I say. “You were right. We can make it to Mexico.”

“I have to go back,” Cal says quietly.

“What?” I stare down into the water. Reginald’s body has disappeared completely. “Why? That stupid fake contract you signed? That wasn’t real, Cal! It wasn’t even your name on it. I saw it!”

Again I stare at his shirt. There is so much blood.

“Not that,” he says, shaking his head. “That police officer, Alice.”

“He’s dead.” I spit the words. “Let the devil worry about him.”

But there is something in Cal’s eyes that I can’t quite understand.

“He is dead, isn’t he, Cal?”

“Alice.” He takes my hand. “I couldn’t just watch an innocent man die.”

And then I understand. The blood on his shirt is not the police officer’s blood at all. Or not his alone.

That single gunshot I heard was not for him at all.

“What did you do?” I whisper the words. “What did you do, Cal?”

“She was killing him, Alice. And once he was dead, there was nothing to stop her. There was a whole crowd out there.” His voice breaks. “Children.”

“You shot her.” It’s not a question. “You shot Omisha.”

“I had to. If not me, someone else would have, but not before she killed more people. She was dangerous, Alice.”

I turn away.

Cal’s voice is pleading. “I held her as she went. Made sure it was easy. That she wasn’t alone.”

The blood. It is Omisha’s blood. Omisha who is dead.

“No.”

“Listen to me.” Gently, he spins me around. “There’s a man dead back there and a cop who’s been badly injured. Someone is going to jail. But I won’t let it be you.”

He wants this. He has been waiting his whole life for something worth giving his life to save.

Just like what his father did for him.

For us.

This, for Cal, is love.

“I’m going to tell them I’m the one who let the tiger go,” he says, his face becoming animated as he fills in the details of the plan. “That I was jealous and so I killed that man. And then they’re going to arrest me.”

“They’ll kill you.” I whisper the words.

“I don’t think so. I saved that officer’s life. Left him his gun so he knew I meant him no harm. It might count for something.” He smiles, and my heart breaks as he starts to back away, the hero of his own love story. “But if they do, it doesn’t matter, Alice. Don’t you see? Everything I ever did has led to this. Meeting you. My father’s death. None of it was an accident. I was always meant to be here, right now, with you. And I’d give up my life a hundred times before I’d ever let you give up yours. Stay here. I don’t like goodbyes.”

He kisses my cheek a final time, and I see the scatter of freckles across his nose—stars, really. A map of our fate.

And then he walks away.

I told you that you weren’t going to like me, but here is where I hate myself.

I let him go.

42

Twice Dead

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

Brownie does not say a word as he leads me from my cell. He must see something in my face that tells him I do not wish to talk. Instead, he holds my arm tenderly. Guides me as gently as a father leading his child to First Communion. And for a moment I find some peace for what I am about to do. Then he shoves open the courtroom doors and I am swallowed by noise.

The room is so crowded that some people are not only standing but are being held up by others. I even see a grown man perched on top of his large friend’s shoulders like a toddler.

If my capture was delicious before, it’s twice so after the sheriff’s public murder.

At my entrance, the room erupts.

“Belle!”

“We love you, Belle!”

“Kill her. Kill the Seamstress!”

“Tell us where the diamond is!”

Brownie nudges me gently forward.

In the front room, a gentleman of obvious means sinks to his knees and lifts a single rose, its petals made of tiny diamonds. “Please! Marry me, Belle! I’ll give you my heart!”

One of many idiots who fill the room. I won’t be the one to take his rose, but I’ve no doubt it will be lifted from him before he ever leaves the city.

If he’s lucky, he’ll find a lady of the night and enjoy some bit of pleasure in its giving.

If he’s not, he’ll have it beaten from him, stolen with a thief’s fist instead of a kiss.

I don’t bother to answer him as I glide past, or any of the other admirers who shout out their devotion.

It’s not a man I’m looking for. It’s a woman.

And there, finally, in the front row, I find her. The very one I had Brownie send a telegram to. Her face is puckered into a frown, punctuated by a large brown mole above her lip. When our eyes meet, she gives me a barely perceptible nod.

There are plenty of men who want to see me hang, but there is a woman who wants it more.

“Order! Order!” The judge slams his gavel onto the podium.

I feel the touch of someone’s hand on my neck.

I don’t need to turn around to know who it is.

I can smell him.

Oranges and trail dirt and cinnamon.

“I really wish you would leave,” I say, keeping my back to him.

“I will.” His voice is like sandpaper skimming across my heart. “Just as soon as you agree to go with me.”

“When I’m dead,” I promise, and now I do turn. Our eyes lock. I reach up to brush the dye-stained sweat from his forehead. It runs an inky trail down his face. “You’re getting careless.”

“I’ve never cared more in my life.” His voice catches. And there, in that instant, are all the history and bodies and vows that have piled up between us.

All the torture he’s caused me.

And I’ve caused him.

Yet still, he refuses to let me go.

“You’re a rich man now.” I’m begging. And I don’t care. This is my last chance to save myself. My last chance not to do what I am about to do. “You have money. Freedom. Anything you want in this world.”

“I don’t have you,” he says.

And I know if I don’t do this now, he will keep trying to save me. Over and over again. A girl who only really exists in his mind.

“I can still get you out of here, Alice.” He looks at me eagerly, keeping his voice low. “What you did only proves you’re insane. I’m going to tell the judge—”

And then, in front of the courtroom, making sure that everyone can see, I stand up on my tiptoes and kiss him.

It is long and deep and full of everything I cannot say.

Shocked gasps fill the room. The judge bangs ever more furiously on his gavel.

My husband pulls away, unsteady, and for a single instant I’m reminded of the preacher so long ago. The way he rocked backward with the hole in his chest, just before he fell dead to the floor.

“ORDER! THE NEXT MAN OR WOMAN WHO SPEAKS, I WILL HAVE THROWN OUT OF THIS COURTROOM, SO HELP ME GOD!” Finally, the judge quiets the room with his threat.

The rowdy audience calms, and those who can take their seats. The others stand hushed in the rear, pressed together and waiting.

In the jury box, I see the faces of twelve men ready to declare me guilty.

All I have to do is give them the chance.

The judge turns to my husband. “Sir. I will have to demand that you control your wife. I will not tolerate such wanton displays in this courtroom.”

“Yes, Your Honor.” My husband nods. “I completely agree, and I assure you, it won’t happen again. As I told you, she’s insane. What happened with the sheriff was unfortunate, but it was no fault of hers. That man had been abusing her. She never meant to hurt him. She was only trying to save herself.”

The judge frowns. “That’s not what it looked like to me.”

“Last chance,” I whisper. “Run.”

He doesn’t move.

I step in front of him and face the judge.

I make my voice loud. Sane. Clear as a bell. “Your Honor.” The judge looks at me as if I’m an actual serpent who has gained the power of speech. “There is something I need to say.”

“I think we’ve heard all we need from you.”

And now I’ve had enough.

“Your Honor, if you won’t listen to me, then I hope you will listen to her.”

All eyes follow mine to the front pew where a woman in a severe gray dress sits, clutching something to her chest. I nod to her and she stands.

Her eyes burn straight through me.

“My name is Lucretia Salinger. Reginald Salinger’s sister.” She points a shaky finger at my husband. “And that man is not my brother.”

For a second, the judge looks like he is going to tell her to sit down. But there is something in the way she speaks, the tintype that she holds to her chest, that makes him change his mind, gavel midair.

Now it is my turn. “She’s telling the truth.”

“What are you saying?” I feel almost sorry for the judge as he tries to keep his composure.

And now, finally, the man I just kissed begins to work his way toward the door. As he does, I take the things in my pocket and, under the guise of a cough, slip them into my mouth. There’s a good clear path for him, but he’ll have to hurry.

I need him to be free.

And so I give him the final distraction he needs to escape. I rise on my tiptoes like a demon and then begin to spit bloody glass and feathers onto the audience. Onto the priest, who is clutching his Bible in the front row.

He holds his cross up to me. “She’s possessed!” he screams. “I told you she’s possessed.”

I grin a bloody grin.

My display gives him two extra seconds. Three. All eyes are on me as the judge bangs his gavel. “Is he or is he not your husband?”

“He is, Your Honor.”

“Well, if he’s not Reginald Salinger, then who the hell is he?”

My husband turns around in the courtroom door, and I let him name himself.

“My name is Cal Eyre—the Birdman.” He drops an insolent wink. “And that woman’s my wife.”

Then he blows me a final kiss before disappearing out the door.

Interlude

Bernhard Price

Past

Abilene, Texas

The things a boy will do for love.

He’s not a boy anymore, but she sure as hell makes him feel like one. Belle King. The woman he means to make marry him.

He’s bought her the biggest damn diamond in Texas—the Prairie Rose, a pink diamond the size of his fist, just for her—and tonight he’s going to pop the question.

He’s a true cattleman. Jeans and a rope and enough money to buy Texas if he wanted.

But he’s not greedy.

He could sleep in the open with no more than his gun and his hat for months and be just fine.

And sometimes he does. Sometimes Bernhard “Big Tex” Price leaves one of his six houses and goes out onto his land with the cowboys he’s hired to work with them through winter.

It was what he was planning on doing now, in fact. But he can’t. Because he saw that little girl perform at the opera house in New York, and now she’s all he can think about.

No, he’s not greedy, but he’s used to getting what he wants.

And he wants her. This girl who met him backstage after her show wearing little more than a curse on her lips.

He was drunk, sure. They all were. He and the New York bigwigs he’d come to town to let wine and dine him in exchange for some of his money to invest in their steel company.

So, yeah, he’d let them buy him a few drinks with dinner and then showed them how to drink whiskey without a chaser. And by the time they took him to this underground show at a little place that was just for men who could afford a month’s salary to see it, he was seeing stars.

But so was everybody once she stepped onstage.

She was just so damned…vulnerable. That was it. She reminded him of a red wolf he found once with its paw all mashed up, trying to shove her way through a barbed-wire fence. The farmers had started putting the damned stuff everywhere, and this particular wolf had backed a deer up against it when he first saw her. A big buck, nearly twice her size, and the wolf had chased him to the barbed wire so that the deer now had nowhere to go.

Then again, neither did the wolf.

She could let the buck go. Just turn around and run away from her newly trapped prey. The deer was far too big and too dangerous for one creature to take down alone, especially in tight corners.

But he knew as soon as he saw the damned thing’s yellow eyes she wasn’t going to do that.

He had half a mind to help her, but he knew that it was best to let wild things do what they were going to do and not get involved.

And so he watched.

And sure enough, after a few minutes of panic the deer charged forward. The wolf got a good bite on his neck, and he was pleased to see her avoiding the sharp points of its giant antlers. But she could not avoid the hooves. Teeth sunk in deep, she tried to roll the deer, and as she did, the creature stepped on her with its heavy hooves, leaving her right front paw to take all its weight.

Still she didn’t let go, and Bernhard watched in awe as the little thing rolled the deer into the barbed wire and the two of them fought until they were both bloody from the fence.

Finally, the deer stopped moving, and the red wolf let go with a huff, sinking down to lick her paw.

He knew he should leave it alone. But he couldn’t help it. He admired a creature like that. One that wasn’t afraid of taking on something bigger than itself.

So he steadied his horse—a good beast; most others would have run—and slid off her, hands open to approach the wolf.

She caught sight of him out of the corner of her eye and gave a warning growl.

“Easy, girl,” he told her, holding out his hands. “I just want to help.”

She stilled, and for a moment their eyes met. Hers went straight to his heart, catching it like the barbed wire had caught and torn her skin.

In that instant, he thought he could reach out and pet her. Stroke the silky red-and-gray fur of her belly.

And he almost did.

Then she bared her teeth and ran, forcing her already-torn body through the wires of the fence, not making a sound as it tore her further.

Then she was gone, loping off into the distance.

He always wondered if she’d survived. It would be damned hard, being a wounded creature like that out in the prairie.

But his money was on her. Sometimes wounded creatures knew how to take care of themselves better than whole ones.

He hadn’t thought of that wolf for years. Not until he saw Belle King on the stage. And then that was exactly what he thought of. The way she sang like she was baring her belly and at the same time looked at you in a way that said she’d rip your throat out if you got too close.

So, yes, he’d wanted to get to know her a little better. See how close he could get to her bite.

The New York fellows thought he was being foolish. Said she refused to ever see anyone after her shows.

But when Bernhard “Big Tex” Price made his way backstage, waving his six-shooter at anyone who got in his way, saying he wanted to see the pretty little songbird, she met him in the middle of the hallway with nothing but a smile on her face and asked why a big man like him had no manners.

And so Bernhard did what any man in his position would do. He dropped down on one knee, took his hat in his hand, and asked her to marry him.

And then he waited, those yellow eyes going up and down his body like she wanted to eat him clean up.

“I’ll think about it,” she said. “If you bring me a big enough diamond.”

He said he’d make sure it was the biggest one he could find.

“Good. I’ll be in Texas next month. Sounds like you might just know your way around there.”

He nodded. “Oh yes, ma’am. I do.”

“There’s a little spot I like,” she said. “Way out in the prairie. A place where no one can bother us. I’ll tell you where to find it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll surely be there.”

“Oh, and one more thing.” She didn’t act shy at all as she came up and put her tiny foot right in the middle of his chest like she was pinning a snake to the ground. “Better bring me a rope. A good one. Light enough for a lady but strong enough that I can tie you up.” She winked one liquid gold eye. “Fellow like you seems like he could use some manners.”

Bernhard “Big Tex” Price grins, remembering that promise. He pats the side of his saddle where he’s got one curled up, made special just for her. He’s had the finest rodeo craftsman in Mexico make it, and it’s thin as a bracelet but strong enough that a bull couldn’t escape.

He hopes she’ll make him fight a little.

That sure would be some fun.

And when he meets her on that little patch of land outside of Abilene—he’s bought it; hell, why not?—and hands her the diamond, she does more than make him fight.

She makes him beg.

And when she unties him and wraps the rope around her wrist, whistling into the sky for the dark thing to come down and take it, he watches with the last light of life in his eyes still sparkling—just barely—until it goes out.

Part IV

The Dead

43

Where He Married Me

Two Years Prior

Hell’s Half Acre, Kansas

It’s him. It’s always been him.

Because just before I let Cal go, I make the biggest mistake of my life—I marry him.

Hell’s Half Acre, Kansas, is a stretch of land that was once full of bodies. Put there in part by a girl hardly older than me.

The Bloody Benders, they were called. And beautiful Kate was the bloodiest of them all.

Kate Bender and her family killed over a dozen people, including two children. Their victims are gone now, the bodies dug up, but like hundreds of others who’ve come to this place before me, I want to know who Kate was.

Why she killed.

But more importantly, I want to know who I am. Alice or Belle? Who killed that preacher so long ago? Who let Reginald do horrible things to her for a year without fighting back? Am I a girl or am I a monster?

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can feel Reginald near me. Can feel the itch of some other girl’s bloody dress against my skin.

I’ve started to wonder about those dresses. About the kinds of things Reginald did to get them. I convinced myself for a long, long time that he’d paid the poor girls for them. Maybe hurt their owners a little and then gave them some of his gambling money to shut them up.

But now I’m not so sure.

Or, rather, now that I’m free, I’m beginning to let myself peek beneath the lies I told myself to survive.

But the truth is this—I think he killed them.

I know how he’d hurt me until I begged him to stop. How it was the only thing that allowed him to get anywhere close to lovemaking.

But I don’t think he stopped with the others.

I don’t think he would have stopped with me either.

Not eventually.

One time it would have gone too far, and he would have given my bloody dress to some new bride. I thought he kept me because he needed me. Because I was clever and smart and good at the gambling table.

But there are a million clever girls. I am no one special.

Or, rather, they were all special.

All the girls he used and threw away.

And so here, on this haunted land with Kate Bender’s ghosts, I finally admit something to myself.

I want Reginald to find me so that I can kill him. I want to hurt him like he hurt all those girls.

Like he hurt me.

I was afraid that if I hurt someone else—no, let’s call it what it is; if I killed him—then I would pay the price.

But the price has already been paid.

Over and over again, we women continue to pay it.

Maybe, if we want justice in this world, we need to make it ourselves.

And maybe God puts a special kind of woman on this earth to bring it. One who doesn’t just kill because it is deserved but because she enjoys it.

Women like Kate Bender.

Women like me.

Maybe we are here to balance the scales.

I’m not saying we should love women like Kate Bender.

I’m saying that we must acknowledge that they exist.

That for every tiger you kill, there is one who will sharpen her teeth on your bones.

“Alice?” Cal stands looking at me eagerly, like a child. We have come out to this small patch of land at sunset, and the prairie looks like it is covered in blood.

Miles and miles of tall grass, and there, in the distance, the ruins of the small house where they say it all happened.

Kate and her mother, inviting passing travelers to lodge with them, luring them to an intimate dinner.

Seating their guests at a small table in front of a curtain and talking to them while someone—their husband? their brother?—hits them on the head with a hammer before Kate drags them down to the cellar to slit their throats.

“Thieves,” the papers dubbed them. Killing for money. But I’m not so sure.

A woman who kills is always given a selfish reason. Money. An unfaithful lover. But why?

I think a woman can contain as much evil as a man.

“Alice, are you listening to me?” The sunlight has lit Cal up like a young god in some old museum painting. He looks so beautiful my heart hurts with it.

I don’t like the way that it beats so out of control or the fear that I feel as he digs his hand into his dungarees pocket and pulls out a small box.

And then he’s down on one knee holding that stupidly tiny little box in his hand—clean, I notice. Far too clean. Cal’s nails are always caked with dirt from the little things he’s rescuing, the fallen berries he’s scooping from the ground to feed his birds, the drowning worms he pulls from rain puddles to deposit in freshly dug banks of mud.

And his eyes. Oh my God, I’ve never had a man look at me like that before. I don’t know if anyone ever has.

This.

This is the only thing I’ve ever really been afraid of. Loving a man so much I would do anything to make him happy, even if it means losing myself.

“Get up,” I say, or mean to say, but the words catch in my throat.

And he opens the box.

Inside, it is empty. He smiles that stupid, perfect smile. “I don’t have a ring,” he says. “Not yet. But I mean to get you one if you’ll have me. The biggest goddamn diamond in the world.”

And how can I tell him the truth about who I really am? How can I be that and love him anyway? Let him love me?

“Alice Springer,” he says. And then he grins. “Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” I say.

Because I love him.

The feeling has grown like a small seed tucked deep into the earth and then risen inside me, winding around my heart and crawling out of my throat until I cannot help but speak its name.

I love him.

And maybe he really loves me too. All of me. Alice and Belle. After all, he has seen them both.

And even though everything must end, some things deserve a chance to begin. So ever so gently I take the empty box from his hand.

“We can go down to the courthouse, change our names…”

“No.” I shake my head. “We’ll do it here. Now. We don’t need any papers. This is enough.”

And so we do.

I won’t tell you everything that is said because most of it is not done in words.

I carve our names into a sandstone rock, part of the same bloody ground where the Bender women buried the bodies of all those men.

Nobody ever found the Benders in the end. By the time the bodies were discovered, the entire family had disappeared.

But I can feel them now, watching. Maybe they’re dead. Or maybe, when you’ve given so much blood to a piece of land, you can’t ever really leave.

So I let them be. Wherever they are, I let them be whole here, let them see a flawed girl who has sinned and been sinned against and who chooses to love herself not in spite of these things but because of them.

Who will sin again.

Who lets a boy for the first and only time want her just as she is. The light and the dark.

And here, my skin pressed against the earth, I claim this totality for every girl who cannot. I claim it for myself.

And then I whisper a promise in his ear that I don’t know if I can keep.

“I love you, Cal. And I’ll do anything in the world not to hurt you.”

44

The Verdict

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

Belle King is to hang.

Just as I expected, the jury decides my fate in less than an hour—guilty on all charges.

And something I did not expect: The Vatican’s priest is also to be granted his exorcism.

The judge is furious at having been made to look like a fool. “In order to avoid any other grounds for a mistrial, I am going to goddamn well take care of all the demons, false defenses, and desperados anyone else can think to throw at me. I am four months away from retirement.” Scrunch. Scrunch. The judge’s drink-soaked face trembles. “Four. Which”—scrunch, scrunch—“means that I have served as an arbiter of the law for over forty years.” The veins on his red nose stand out, creating a flower of outrage. “And I have never”—he pounds his fist on the podium—“never seen the absolute disgraceful display of sheer disregard for morality and respect for governance that I have seen with this trial.”

Half the crowd cheers him on, while the rest of the courtroom joins in with an equally spirited booing.

The judge bangs his tiny wood gavel, and when that doesn’t work, he takes an actual pistol from somewhere underneath his robe and fires it into the air. “That is, by God, enough. Whatever demons this woman has will be removed by the priest tonight, and this woman”—he stares with eyes flaming at me, and I offer him a cheery smile—“this devil,” he amends, “will hang tomorrow at sunset! And if we catch the so-called Birdman, he’ll hang too!”

The crowd once again erupts, and not even the new sheriff’s pistol can quiet them this time.

I am yanked roughly out of the courtroom by two men the judge had insisted Brownie hire as extra guards. The crowd’s eager hands paw me as I go, trying to steal a souvenir. A piece of my hair, my dress, my attention.

In the limekiln, Brownie locks me inside and then waves the other guards away. They go grudgingly.

“Miss King.” Brownie stands at my cell door, removing his hat as though he is calling on a lady rather than attending a condemned murderer. “Is there anything I can get you. A last meal, perhaps?”

“No, Brownie.” I’m touched at his thoughtfulness. Hicks would never have bothered. But then, Hicks won’t be bothering with anything ever again. “Thank you. I think I’d like to be alone.”

“I understand.” He nods. “That priest fellow will be here in a few hours to give you your exorcism.” He shakes his head in disgust, letting me know exactly what he thinks of that. “But until then, you just take some time for yourself. Think about what you’ve done. Why you’re here.” His old eyes grow tender. “But God don’t need a priest to listen. I expect he’ll forgive you if you ask.”

I close my eyes.

I don’t need forgiveness from God.

I need it from Cal.

When I open my eyes, I’m surprised to see Brownie still standing there. “You could have run away with that Birdman fellow when he was still pretending to be your first husband. The judge would have let you walk right out of here. Why didn’t you? I thought you loved him.”

“I do,” I say softly. “More than anything in the world.”

Brownie nods wisely, as if he understands. “I hope you find peace, Miss King,” he says. And, tipping his hat, he leaves.

Lying down on my cot, I fold my hands across my chest.

When you lose someone you love, it is only natural to grieve.

When they first arrested Cal for the man Omisha killed, I let myself spend some time in that state of grief.

I could not be comforted.

There is, after all, no comfort in condemning a part of yourself.

At first I was angry. But Cal simply did what his father would do and had done. He had saved those who most needed saving.

The people the tiger would surely have killed, yes, but in his way, I knew that Cal thought he was saving Omisha too. Protecting her from the far crueler death she would have suffered as a man-killer.

Protecting me.

No, Cal did not know any better. But I did.

I was the one who, night after night, tried to turn her into something she was not. Asked her to become a performer that turned back into a beast on command.

I killed Omisha.

Cal had simply carried out the act.

When I was a little girl, there was an old man who lived in the mountains near to my mother and me. He had a leg that was gone, taken from him in the Civil War by a cannon. He sometimes came to her to ask for medicine. Not for the stump that was left, nor for his other leg, which was riddled with scars.

He needed it to numb the pain in the limb that was already gone.

Even though it was not there anymore, he swore he could feel it. He would wake up nights screaming. It was unbearable, he said. The pain he felt in that piece of him that was no longer there.

And that was how it was when Cal took Omisha’s life.

How it is.

And so I took a boat all the way to Europe to escape.

I did not mean to become famous. Others work for it. Devote their lives to a calling. I came to it by accident.

For weeks the only thing that could soothe me after Omisha’s death and Cal’s arrest was the opera—specifically, a performance of Dido and Aeneas in Vienna. It was a small thing. Resurrected by a baron for his mistress for only but a few exquisite performances. I went every night. And on the third week, a strange thing happened. The soprano stopped suddenly, near the end of her final song. Her voice had broken. She could not go on.

Not thinking, I sang right from my seat. The words came easily to me. I had memorized them those nights in the audience. Lived them—“Dido’s Lament.”

A woman’s cry for her lover who had abandoned her. Her willingness to die, to light herself on fire so that her love might see her death from his departing ship.

It might have been a play written in my own heart. Because if my death could have turned back time before that diamond, before that final dance in her cage, I would have given it gladly.

I closed my eyes, and I did not so much sing as cry.

My own lament. My own desire to die or, perhaps, to want to die. I did not know. I only knew the pain of what I had done.

And whether I sang for Cal or Omisha or myself, I did not know either.

I was my own shadow.

The audience devoured it.

All of my rawness mixed with Reginald’s forced trainings on how to sing and perform music properly. How to charm an audience with my voice in their drawing rooms after dinner. How to be a lady. All my time performing with the Damned.

After that, it was easy. I was a mystery. A surprise. A success.

I made quite a name for myself turning to the two things that could, for a moment, still the pain.

I sang and I killed.

I sang on the most beautiful stages, and I killed the most beautiful men.

Some might call it revenge, killing men who thought they could buy my heart when someone else already had it.

But wild things know nothing of revenge.

If you kill a lion’s cubs, she will kill you not because of what you have done but because you are there and stink of meat.

She will kill you because doing so will let loose the bloodlust that is inherent in her very bones.

She will kill you because when she kills, she becomes something else entirely.

Something untouchable—beyond flesh and blood and bone.

She is destruction, the maker of chaos, the mother of death, and only when you unleash her fury, only when the living are dead, can new life be fed.

When they took Cal, I killed men because I could not kill the part of myself that had said yes to a last dance—to wanting to sip that first cup of tea.

It was a comfort while it lasted.

But tomorrow, finally, we will both be free.

Tomorrow he will never be able to hurt me again. Nor I him.

I lie there, eyes closed, and that is when I hear the music start out my window.

It is loud and jubilant and demands to be heard.

And I know exactly who it is.

The Carnival of the Damned has come to town.

45

Last Supper

One Year Prior

Von Hohenzollern Castle, Romania

It’s the blackbirds that convince me to die.

The past year has been a triumph. Belle King has taken Europe by storm, and Philip von Hohenzollern, cousin to a Romanian prince, is only the latest in a long line of men to offer me his heart.

I have agreed to take it, but only if he pays me enough.

“Since it is your birthday”—Philip’s eyes glisten with excitement—“I thought I would prepare you something special.”

We are in his castle. A small castle, granted—its Gothic lines pressed against unassuming farmland—but a castle nonetheless. The dining table at which we are seated is black Italian marble and is heavy enough to crush a dozen men. Philip has ordered it spread with my favorite foods. Roast duck, fresh oysters, cream soups, giblet gravies, and freshly baked bread shaped into intricate animals and laced with rosemary and other herbs.

Philip, who is nearly sixty, is especially eager to convince me just how modern he really is.

He has ordered the food presented à la russe, instead of à la française—a newer style of dining popular with younger European nobility. Courses are served to each individual guest one plate at a time instead of placed all together at once in the center of the table. Russian culture and its literature are all the rage right now. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy—the great authors’ imaginations are sweeping Europe with their complex portrayals of snow-covered families and class-afflicted battles of love and war.

I too am captivated by their all-too-human sinners, recognizing in them for the first time in literature something akin to myself. I even let on hints that I am Russian for a bit, slipping the false trace of an accent into my speech. A princess, perhaps, banished from her country over some family quibble.

Though by the next week people are insisting I am Welsh.

Even the few people I met on my earlier trip to Europe with Reginald do not recognize me, and the mystery of my identity is one of my greatest draws. On and on the rumors swirl.

I am rich.

No, I am poor.

I have been married a dozen times.

I am a virgin.

I kill men.

I save their souls with my songs.

The enigma of Belle King’s identity keeps the opera houses and theaters packed each night I perform. No one knows who I am, but then again, no one really wants to know. People prefer to make me into whatever girl they desire.

As for me, I need very little to put on a show. My voice is enough. I let it caress the notes of whatever the orchestra knows, stealing a solo from that night’s soprano or—and these are the occasions I liked best—performing a song that I used to sing with my mother.

On those nights, with no instrument to accompany me, I can bring the house down.

Performance is an illusion. But the best illusion of all is being yourself. Letting just enough of the truth poke through, raw and powerful and untamed, so that the audience thinks they know you.

There is no drug any man or woman wants more.

Just a taste, a touch, of something real, packaged and gilded in the expensive trappings of all the world pretends is valuable.

Jewels and silks and palace stages.

But what they really want is a glimpse of someone’s heart.

And night after night I give mine to them. Bare my aching soul a jagged piece at a time.

Afterward, I slip off whatever stage I am on and take the men and their compliments for all they are worth. Their offers of wealth beyond my wildest dreams in return for more of what I promised on the stage.

Myself.

I use their desire to lure them into empty dressing rooms and behind dark stages. Through poorly lit streets and into unmarked taverns.

From their dreams to their nightmares.

And then I kill them.

All the men who dare to try to claim my heart.

Because how can they when it is already taken?

And how dare they be free when Cal is not. Alive when Omisha is not.

When I am not, at least not fully.

Philip shifts in his seat, a large candelabra lighting the space between us over the marble table. The chairs are made of antlers, thick sheepskin draped on their backs. And across the table, me.

Philip wears a finely decorated military jacket with a large silk sash. I wear his jewels—a family necklace composed entirely of diamonds—and little else. My skin has been rubbed with lotion flecked with gold so that in the candle’s glow, I am my own treasure.

Philip stares at me hungrily.

“What have you made me?” I smile, toying with the silver-rimmed goblet in front of me.

“Wait and see,” he says, leaning back in his antlered throne.

I don’t like Philip. I don’t like any of the men I kill, but Philip is a special case. He has done nothing overtly wrong. He is a perfect gentleman. Not pleasing to look at, certainly, unlike so many of the men I’ve killed. With his liver-spotted skin and drooping eyes, he looks rather like a fish. His thinning beard hangs in gray-brown wisps like a catfish’s whiskers around his chin.

But his unfortunate appearance is not why I don’t like him.

There is something of Reginald in the way he moves. The glint in his eyes that suggests he owns the whole world.

A cruelness that has yet to reveal itself.

“Cook!” He claps his hands quickly, three times. “Bring us our next course!”

A stooped man wheels in a giant wooden cart. His eyes are downcast, but there is a nervousness about his face.

A single large pie, a dozen times the size of a normal one, rests in the center of his cart.

“I don’t care for sweets,” I tell Philip.

“I assure you”—he grins—“there’s nothing sweet about this.”

Again, there is that gleam in his eyes, and again as he leans across the table I am reminded of Reginald.

Philip nods to the cook, and the man steps forward into the light.

For the first time I see the sharp blade he holds in his hand.

And then I notice that the pie is moving.

Steaming secretions bubble up from the latticed crust, but this is not what is causing the pie’s liquid to shudder. The cook hands the knife to Philip, and wobbling to a stand, he plunges it into the pie’s crust.

I watch in horror as something hard and gnawing pokes through the hole.

And then another. A bird’s beak followed by a talon and a horrible, sticky wing. And the acrid smell of singed feathers.

Blackbirds.

Philip sits back down and claps his hands in delight. “Do you like it?”

The first bird escapes fully and then tries to fly away. But his wings are covered in goo, his eyes singed closed.

I don’t stop to think.

To this point I have killed carefully.

I have left my admirers dead in fields and ditches. Slipped my knife between their rib cages in beds made beneath the stars.

Left them in parts of the town where thieves would quickly find them.

Never once did I kill a man in a place where anyone knew I had been.

But in this moment, I no longer care.

It’s the birds. They are so very like Cal’s.

I remove the glittering diamond necklace from my throat.

No jewelry on, except for an invisible ring that forever circles the fourth finger of my left hand.

I rise to stand behind the nobleman’s chair.

“See,” Philip crows, his breath straining with excitement, as I lean over him and my hair brushes his face. “I knew you would like it. Just like the nursery rhyme! And you can keep the necklace, my dear. It’s all yours.”

Instead, I wrap it around his neck.

And as he struggles to rise, I pull.

Tighter and tighter—a seamstress’s hands are always strong. And when the old man tries to rise, I do not let go.

From the shadows, the poor cook who brought out the hideous pie watches. He does not move to help.

And as Philip chokes out his last breath and the final baked bird tries to free itself from the steaming pie, I know exactly what I am going to do.

It’s the horrible blackbirds that have given me the idea.

All this time I thought that fate had doomed Cal and me forever.

It follows us as surely as a tiger stalks its prey.

But maybe I was wrong. Maybe I could cut fate’s cords. Maybe one of us just needed to die for both of us to be free.

I am going to go home.

And I am going to break Cal out of jail. No matter what he did, he did it for me. For love. Now there can be no doubt who I really am, what I am capable of. He deserves to make a new choice. And I have my own debts to repay.

He promised me a diamond for our wedding, but I will bring him four. A jewel for each of the times he sacrificed his heart for me. Once when he stole me, taking me from my own husband; twice when he killed me, letting his sweet Alice die in that crowded Deadwood saloon so that Belle might live; thrice when he saved me from the law after Omisha’s death; and a final time for when he married me and I left him for Hell.

Four priceless diamonds—enough money for anyone to start a new life. And four prominent dead men. Enough to have anyone hanged.

A treasure map of our love that will lead him, eventually, to me.

And with my death, I will set us both free.

Philip’s body slumps onto his empty plate, and I toss the diamonds on his corpse.

There will be plenty more where I’m going.

Only then does the cook step forward from the shadows.

“Poor master,” he says, before dropping me a wink and continuing in his accented English. “The meal too rich for his old heart.”

Interlude

Viktor Crane

Past

Deadwood, Dakota Territory

He is risking his job for her. But it seems such a little thing. All she wants in return is a diamond.

And an open window.

The diamond is easy enough. He could buy hundreds of those. Thousands.

No, it’s the open window that gives him pause.

“I don’t understand it. What is that fellow to you?”

“Now, Viktor. Are you jealous?”

“No.” He is, of course. Horribly so. But he knows women like her don’t like that. They want you to treat them as if you don’t care and then prove you do with your pocketbook.

“How about a song?” she asks.

She is appeasing him. Using him. He knows it.

But, God, he’s never wanted to be used by anyone so much in his life. And that’s saying something. Viktor Crane is a self-made man, worth millions. And when he came into his money, he used it as such men do—to buy everything he thought that he would never have.

Houses.

Racehorses.

Fine clothes.

Women.

He’s had hundreds of them on nearly every continent in the world. He’s a thief, after all, and surprisingly enough, women like thieves.

Oh, people don’t outright call him a thief. Because he makes money for the rich, they give him many more laudable titles. Liaison. Broker. Advisor.

But the truth is he’s a yes-man. And he helps those with money make more of it.

And in return, he gets enough money to do what he wants. Own what he wants.

But men can’t own a woman like the one in front of him. Not really.

“I heard you dined with the governor the other night,” she says, stretching her arms above her head and then coming to nestle down on his lap.

He knows exactly what she’s doing. This intimacy, the yawn—it’s a suggestion of where they could be if only he’d do as she asked.

But it’s the mention of the governor that does it. Because no matter how much money he has, there are always men like the governor who have what he never can.

No matter how goddamn much he makes or steals in this lifetime, his money will always be new. And for some reason, in this world, it matters.

Which makes him all the more determined to possess this woman.

Because he knows how badly men like the governor want her.

And for once in his life he wants to own something they can’t have.

But, Christ, she’s making it hard. Gently, he shoves her off his lap.

“Come on, now, Belle. I can give you the diamond. As big a one as you want. But the window…” His face screws up. “I don’t like it.”

“What don’t you like about it, Viktor?”

They are in Deadwood, and if he were smart, he’d go to one of the whorehouses in town. But rumor of her performances had reached him even in Denver. An American starlet that had taken Europe by storm and now was back home, touring.

It was said that if you paid her a diamond, she’d see you alone. Give you a private dance. And so he’d gone to her show last week and brought the biggest damned one he had—his wife’s wedding ring.

It wasn’t that he didn’t love his wife. He did. Of course he did. But he didn’t want to go to the trouble of hunting down a jewel so big on such short notice. And so he’d left her back at the hotel in Denver and taken the ring, coming out here to woo Belle King.

The problem was, when he got to the show, he’d found a dozen men eager to do the same.

Including the bastard of a senator who’d told him about her in the first place.

“Here.” He calls her over. “Let me see how it looks on your finger. You know that diamond even has a name? Thor’s Revenge, it’s called, ’cause it’s got a spot of red in the middle.”

He picks up the ring where she’s tossed it carelessly onto the table in the small house he’s bought for her. A whole goddamn house on top of it all! Just so that she can live in it for the week of her shows. Shouldn’t that be enough?

“Jeweler said it’s worth close to fifty thousand dollars.”

“I’m sure your wife loved it,” Belle says, slipping the jewel onto her finger and staring at it disdainfully. It’s too big for her. His wife is nearly twice the size of this girl.

Yawning, Belle takes it back off and tucks it in his shirt pocket. “It’s very nice, Viktor, but you know I can have a dozen of these.”

Well, now, that wasn’t exactly fair, was it? There was only one Thor’s Revenge.

As if reading his thoughts, she slides back onto his lap. “But there is only one of you, Vic. One man I trust to get me what I really want.”

He’s falling under her spell again, even if he knows she’s a goddamn witch. It’s those eyes. He’s never seen anything like them. Yellow, like a cat’s.

But she only lets him hold her for a minute before she arches her back and jumps away like the skittish feline she is.

“Here’s the thing, Belle,” he says. He’s panting. He hates to show her his weakness like that, but dammit, he’s only a man! “You’re right. I’m not like the other fellows. I’ve done my own checking. And I know what you want with that window. You want to send that man messages. The one who went to jail for you.”

“Now, Vic, maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. But what harm could it possibly do?”

It could harm him, that’s what.

Harm his pride.

She wants him to use his connections to get the jailer in Las Vegas, New Mexico, to leave the second-story window open for a boy they call the Birdman.

It’s easy enough. There’s a group that runs that town called the Dodge City Gang because that’s where a few of them came from. They control everything there, and he’s worked with them before.

Easy enough, yes, but the open window still bothers him.

Because the Birdman isn’t just a boy. He’s Belle King’s lover. Or was, once. The papers have not made the connection of the little girl and her traveling circus who sang at the hangings a couple years ago, and why would they? That was just a two-bit operation with some girl who sang pretty songs and took off pieces of her clothes on occasion, while the woman who performed at the opera houses in Europe and now all over the United States is a rich woman who is known to have been proposed to by a duke. She has clearly had classical voice training and wears clothes that are rumored to cost as much as a house, all bought by her admirers.

But it’s her. He’s sure of it. She disappeared over a year ago after this boy she wants the window left open for killed a fellow with a goddamn tiger the fools had been dragging around with them, and that’s exactly why he knows it was her and the boy was her fellow.

The man he’d killed had apparently been trying to take advantage of Belle, and the boy had sicced the tiger on him to keep it from happening.

Which is exactly what Viktor would do, if he had the chance. He’d kill anyone who dared lay a hand on her.

“Well,” Belle says. “What is it? Are you going to get the jailer to leave the window open or not? I know you have connections, Viktor, and not just with proper folks like all the other boring men who come to visit me.” She smiles, and his whole body goes weak. “You’re special,” she says. “You can get things done, even in the darkest of places.”

She’s right about that. Nobody ever really appreciates it properly, especially not the rich men he usually does things for.

But she does. Because unlike what most folks think, he knows that Belle’s not so proper as all that.

She’s done her own thieving.

“It’s just for his birds,” Belle says. “They mean so much to him. I want him to be able to talk to them again. Teach them a few tricks.”

“Like bringing you letters.”

Her eyes glow. “Is that so much to give him when he saved my life?”

He startles. So she knows he knows. And she’s telling him. Which makes him feel like they have a secret together, and he knows then that he’s going to do it.

“If something happens. If that boy gets out…my reputation will be ruined. And it’s all I’ve got, Belle. People I do deals with, they only do them because they know they can trust me.”

“He’s on the second floor, Vic. And handcuffed half the time. I promise you.” She stares at him with those big golden eyes. “You won’t have to worry about that.”

So finally, because there is nothing he wants more than her, he says yes.

“Thank you,” she says, clapping her hands prettily. “Now, how about that song.” And when she sings, just for him, a song that she sang in Europe for a crown prince, he knows it’s all worth it.

And in the end, she’s right. He doesn’t have to worry about it.

As soon as he’s sent the telegram, he pays her a final visit to collect what’s his due.

And then she makes sure he never has to worry about anything again.

46

Exorcism

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

We all must face our death eventually. But it is a strange thing to know when it is coming.

In the swell of sunlight, my cell looks almost beautiful. I take stock of it a final time, paying homage to this, the last place where Belle King slept. She will never close her eyes on this earth again.

Never fall into sleep; never wake from a dream or a nightmare.

Her last wishes and thoughts and secrets are held here.

We think the world is a vast place, but really, it is nothing but a moment held in time.

And yet most of us keep waiting for more.

For a grand story, a happy ending, a mountain’s summit to climb so that we can prove that our lives have been worthwhile.

But it is the little things that matter.

The tin cup, there, that I drank out of when I was thirsty, a miracle when so many have died from thirst. The wooden chair perched beneath the small table where men other than me have had their final meals, the food made exquisite with its finality. The cot on which I had lain and dreamed of Cal.

And in the end, who needs more?

Who can dare to claim that this isn’t enough? That these seconds lifted out of time—alive for the briefest instant before they dissolve like dust on a moth’s wings forever—aren’t enough?

Certainly not me.

I have had enough.

It has all been enough.

“Hello, Alice.” I look up. A man stands outside my door.

“I’m Father Miguel Santiago.”

“It’s Belle,” I say.

He’s refused to call me by my stage name on purpose, I’m sure. A way for him to put me in my place and gain a little power. But when one of the new men Brownie’s hired opens my cell door to let him in, the priest does not look like a man who is interested in power.

“You may leave,” he tells the jailer.

“Sheriff says I’m to wait.” The young blond man shifts nervously, pulling at his collar. He looks like somebody just harvested him out of the farm fields, which they probably did.

Father Santiago waves his hand dismissively. “I have God’s protection. I don’t need yours. Away with you, child. You may lock the door behind me so you can be sure she can’t escape.”

The young man considers, but it is clear he must be a pious boy unused to disobeying religious authority. “I’ll wait at the top of the stairs,” he compromises.

“That will be fine.” Father Santiago turns back toward me as if the boy has already been forgotten.

The priest is not who I was expecting. I’d assumed they’d send the same one from the courtroom and the judge’s office who is always thumping his Bible at me. But that man had been younger, no more than forty, and very tall and thin like an insect. This priest in his black robe and white collar has a pleasingly plump frame and kind brown eyes. Though his hair is still black, his wrinkled face looks like he has lived forever.

“Father,” I say. “Are you here to give the devil his due?”

He comes closer, bowing his head, though as a sign of respect to me or the Lord, I’m not sure. “May I sit?” he asks.

“You may do as you please.” I expect him to pull out the chair by my window, but instead he takes a seat beside me on my cot.

His robes smell of trail dust and incense. “Where is the other one?” I ask. “The priest who preaches at the church outside? I thought he’d be the one they’d send.”

For a moment the man’s face wrinkles in confusion, and then he laughs. “That fellow? He’s a Baptist preacher, not a priest.”

“But he was the one who said I was possessed and made such a spectacle in court.”

“Yes, well, demons aren’t reserved exclusively to the Catholics.” Again he smiles, and I have the strangest feeling that I would like to have a good glass of wine with him. He seems like he would be the kind of man who could hold his own in a dinner conversation, unlike so many of the dullards I’ve met.

“So he is not the one to give me the exorcism.”

“I suppose he could,” the priest says. “Though I believe there might be a bit more yelling and perhaps some snakes to suck out the poison.”

“Now, Father,” I say, beginning to enjoy our repartee, “that sounds just like the talk of a jealous child warring with his brother on the playground.”

He laughs, and when he does, the brown skin around his eyes crinkles. “Just so,” he says. “Yes, well, even we holy men aren’t immune to sin. Jealousy is one of mine. That Baptist preacher reportedly gives quite powerful sermons. I, on the other hand…” He shakes his head dolefully. “I’m afraid public speaking was never one of my strong suits. I do better in a confession box.”

Reaching beneath his robe, Father Santiago pulls out a black leather Bible.

I stiffen. “So we’re beginning?”

“If you’d like,” he says amiably. And then he sways a little, and I notice that his kind eyes are bloodshot, the lids drooping.

“You look tired,” I say.

His face folds into another gentle smile. “I had to travel hard to get here from Kansas City in time, but on a day like today, it’s not me who needs worried about.” He reaches over and pats my arm softly. “How about you, child? Did you sleep?”

“Don’t worry, Father.” I pull my arm away. “I’ll have all the rest I need soon.”

A cloud passes over his eyes. “That’s why I’m here. I want to make sure that rest is easy.”

“Because you think I’m possessed?”

He hesitates.

“Father Miguel? Sir?” The sound of footsteps on the stairs stops his answer.

The priest looks up, a flash of annoyance crossing his face as the young jailer reappears. “Yes? What is it?”

“The nuns are here to help you with the exorcism.”

The priest frowns.

“I didn’t send for any nuns.”

“The local parish sent us,” the lead one mumbles. There are two of them, one nearly a foot taller than the other.

Their heads are bowed so that I cannot see their faces as they shuffle up to the bars, but I’m hardly paying attention.

Father Miguel takes a second to consider before answering. “I don’t like to put anyone else in danger. Sisters, you may assist in prayer, but please wait outside the cell.”

The tall one nods, and the two women kneel down outside.

I face the priest and ask again, “Do you honestly think I’m possessed? Truly, I was beginning to think you were a reasonable man.” I’m growing angry now. He’d seemed so kind, intelligent even, but despite this fact, he still seems incapable of letting a woman take responsibility for her own actions.

He needs a demon to blame.

“It can be very hard to tell the difference between madness and possession,” he finally answers. “But in the end, it doesn’t matter what I think.” This time he won’t entirely meet my eyes as he opens his Bible. “The Vatican sent me here to do a job, and I’m going to do it.” He turns to address the kneeling women. “Sisters, let’s begin.”

The nuns begin to pray, their words a stream of indecipherable Latin.

Father Santiago stands facing me, his expression blank. “In the name of the Father, and the son—”

“What about my name? Me. Belle King?”

The poor jailer has been hovering outside since he brought down the nuns, but now he looks so scared he can hardly move. Crossing himself, he sprints back up the stairs.

“And the Holy Spirit…”

“I don’t need an exorcism,” I say. “I just need someone to believe me.”

But Father Santiago continues.

“Fine.” I spin on the priest. Because if they want a demon, I will goddamn well give them one. “I am possessed.” I bite my tongue and then let the blood coat my mouth before baring my bloody teeth.

The priest takes a step away, his eyes widening in terror. “I cast you out!”

I spit at him, the blood hitting his clean white collar.

“I am possessed of myself.”

“In the name of Jesus Christ!” Father Santiago cries. “Tell me, demon, what is your name?”

“Belle,” I whisper. “Belle King.”

“Tell me your real name! Is there a demon inside there? Are you simply mad or are you possessed?”

The nuns’ prayers grow louder.

I rip the Bible out of his hands. “Mad? I am furious. All women with a brain should be.”

One of the nuns makes a choking sound and then quickly continues with her prayer.

“I cast you out!” Father Santiago yells again. And for the first time I feel sorry for him. In another time and another place, we might even have been friends.

But not now.

“You want to help women? Let us be mad! Stop trying to cure us!”

“Out!” he repeats, but it is weaker now.

He gives a harsh, hacking cough.

And his tired eyes and drawn face take on a new meaning. He isn’t just tired; he’s sick.

If we continue, I don’t know if his frail body will be able to take it. And if I kill the priest or he passes out before I die, who knows what they’ll do. Probably make me stay alive until they send another to finish the job.

I sink down onto the cot, going limp. And when he bends over, I reach up and grab hold of his rosary. Bringing the cross to my lips, I kiss it.

“There,” the priest says triumphantly. “There, that’s enough. The demon is gone. Child?” He touches me gently. “Would you like to make a final confession?”

“No,” I answer. “I’ll say my own prayers.”

“Very well, then.” He is eager to leave. This spectacle has clearly exhausted him. But before he goes, he pulls a string of beads out of his pocket and hands it to me. A rosary. And on it, instead of a cross, is the gold medallion of a woman. “Perhaps the mother can help you with them.”

“Father?” The shorter nun stands up from kneeling outside the cell, and for the first time I see her beautiful face, looking perfectly innocent in her habit. “Thank heavens you got rid of that fecking demon. May we say a prayer over her now? Give her some holy water?”

“If you like,” the priest says, taken aback and clearly eager to be gone. He looks so worn-out he can hardly stand. He calls for the jailer, who lets him out, locking the door behind them as the priest limps unsteadily toward the stairs.

When they are gone, the beautiful nun with the foul tongue reaches between my bars. In her hand is a small glass bottle with a cross on its front and a cork lid. Leaning close, she passes it to me with a whisper. “Sleep tight, princess.”

The other nun hefts herself from the floor and comes to stand beside the first. Her large freckled face is as familiar as the moon.

“Nice dress,” I say, unable to help myself.

Dom flushes and then grins. “Apparently, God has a real particular sense of style.” And then she leans forward and ever so gently plants a kiss just between the bars on my forehead. “People do stupid things for love. That’s from Cal.”

I feel tears spring to my eyes.

“Just remember, Romeo and Juliet was only a tragedy because they made it one. Not every love story is meant to be forever.” Ama drops me a wink, and then they are gone, following the priest up the stairs.

I clutch the bottle of holy water to my chest, then uncork the lid, just to be sure. Yes. A single sniff confirms it.

Belladonna. Our Sleeping Beauties potion.

Only this time, they’ve given me enough to kill myself.

—

I told you I was going to die.

You can watch if you want.

But if you are smart, you will leave now. Close the pages of this book before I disappoint you any further.

A tiger does not change its stripes, after all.

And a woman cannot sell her heart.

No matter what the fairy tales try to tell you, it cannot be bought with a wish, a kiss, or a spell.

It is hers.

All of it.

And God help the man who tries to claim it for his own.

47

A Prayer for the Damned

Two Years Prior

Frankfurt, Germany

I didn’t kill them all, you know.

There were men who were kind to me.

Men who believed in a woman’s power.

I meet one in Frankfurt, on the night that Reginald buys me a new dress.

He’s bought it on credit, but he spreads the yellow gown across the white hotel bedspread as if he is the richest man in the world. In the noon light, its yellow silk drips with sun.

“Not many women can wear yellow,” he says, and as with most things concerning fashion, he is right. Despite his many flaws, Reginald has an unerring talent for good taste. “Your eyes, though,” he says. “They’re the same color. You’ll turn more than a few heads in that gown.”

I wait for him to tell me that it is not really mine, to take it away and to force one of the dirty ones from the trunk he brings with us everywhere, but he does not.

“Put it on,” he says, and the smile is genuine. Perhaps it is the bottle of champagne, newly opened, the bubbles dancing in his glass. Perhaps it is the game of cards that he has won. Whatever the case, he is in a fine mood, and for once, the gesture seems one born if not of kindness, then at least not from a place of hate.

And so I do. I have just bathed—Reginald insists that I bathe every day. Not because I am ever dirty but because there is something he likes about the cleanness of my skin against the worn and spotted dresses. The degradation that the opposites bring.

I don’t tell him that I am used to dirty dresses. That it is not the feel of the rough and stained cotton on my skin that makes me wince each time I have to put the worn dresses on.

It is the smell of fear. The terror that some poor girl has leaked from her pores and onto this bit of fabric that he insists I wear.

But today’s dress is new and neat and clean, its folds so fresh that I have to shake them away.

The bodice is tightly constructed with intricate buttons, and Reginald calls for a hotel maid to help me put it on. Though her eyes are kind, I flinch at the old woman’s wrinkled touch—it has been so long since a human laid hands on me that did not mean to pinch or strike or demean.

A knowing look steals across her brow as my body tenses, and she begins to speak to me tenderly, in German, like a grandmother might to her child. Her words work a comforting spell on me, and I relax into her hands as she gently tucks and buttons my body into the precious gown.

Finished, she steps away and gives a little sigh, as if she herself is stunned by her work.

Taking my hand, she leads me to the large, gilt-framed mirror that covers one wall of our opulent room, and together we look.

I hardly know the girl who stares back.

In the months since my release from the asylum, my body has begun to change. Gone are the flat planes of my youth. My hips, still slim, have begun to swell, and my breasts, never large, are nevertheless now not just visible beneath the gown but on display, plumped and pushed so that the tops peek out from the yellow velvet like two enticing mounds of cream.

But Reginald’s right. It’s my eyes that make the dress.

The unusual ochre yellow of the fabric matches them exactly, pulls them forth so that they glow. My black hair, newly washed, is twisted like a snake at the back of my neck. Finally, the German woman places a hat on top of my head, full of feathers and velvet, but I make her take it off. She does and then nods, as if I have made the right decision.

The dress is embellishment enough. Its bodice is tight, accentuating my hips, but the end trails away in a bustle of ruffles like cake frosting. My face and its starkness balance the ornamentation. For once, I see how my sharp nose and intense gaze might be to my advantage. I look nothing like the delicate women so in fashion these days, all soft lines and face-framing curls.

I look dangerous.

Night comes, and I gaze in the gilt mirror again before heading down to dinner with Reginald, and though I have tried to hide her, to forget her, I can feel my shadow gazing back with approval.

It is a gown she might have chosen.

A gown that, like the poisonous skin of a colorful lizard, warns descending predators not to take a bite lest they risk their own lives.

That evening’s dinner is a huge success. We have been invited to the home of a duke, a friend of Reginald’s dead grandfather who hosts us and his other guests in a lavish mansion on the banks of the river. I do not know the rules or the customs of dining in such a place. But I am a fast learner. I’ve had to become one. I easily mimic the women around me down to the finest detail.

This the tiny fork to dig the oysters from their shells, this the crystal bowl of rose water not to drink but to dip our fingers in before peeling away the invisible skin from the pink shrimp.

This the face to make when laughing at a gentleman’s joke.

This the angle to tilt your head so that the light from the candles overhead catches the crushed pearl of the lotion on your skin and reflects it back to the lust-glazed eyes across the table.

This.

And this.

And this.

I make not one mistake. Just as at the card tables, I am careful not to make a move until I know the correct one.

But even so, I cannot hide everything about who I am. My split-second hesitations, the careful way I unfold the swan-shaped napkin across my lap as if taking apart a puzzle, the sound of my laughter, a second too long and too shrill, hanging in the air like an errant butterfly who has mistakenly stayed past the first frost—these things set me apart from the others.

But rather than make me less desirable, it makes me more.

And I notice this too. Two years from now, when I return to Europe and take the stage, I will use these observations to my advantage.

For if I were to be exactly as the other women, with their good breeding and honed manners, I could not hope to compare.

There are fairer women with finer faces and fuller lips. Women with knowledge of every pedigree of every family in every country in Europe. Women whose bodies are so perfectly molded inside their gowns that when they stand, they look not like women at all but like some exquisite painting made by a man trying to describe beauty to someone who did not speak his language.

I am none of those things. But in some ways, I am more.

I am a woman whose jagged edges slit the too-tight cravat of decorum. I am the promise of something that has not been captured, that is undiscovered.

Undiscoverable.

A lingering remnant from the darker parts of a dream.

For the first time, I feel my shadow not as something that must be hidden but as a possibility.

One of the best things about this dinner, about the rules of decorum in polite society, is that wives are seated as far away from their husbands as possible. I find myself next to Karl Warner, a man of sixty with a short white beard and hair that curls in wisps about his ears, who though a gentleman by birth maintains a teaching position at the university as a scholar of antiquities.

There is no danger in any sort of affair starting between us. I am married, and he is far too old. And so I allow myself to be just as I am. To speak to him without worry that I am flirting too much or sounding too smart or too ignorant. Reginald glances down the table only once and, seeing my companion does not pose a threat, does not bother to check on me again.

We speak of magic and legends and the stories my mother told me in my childhood about my grandmother and the old country.

He tells me about great warriors and battles and that once upon a time there was a poet who was a woman and who wrote some of the world’s greatest poems to another woman, and that it is one of the most beautiful love stories ever told.

He tells me of gladiators, and I tell him of the wrestling matches between the strongest boys in the Kentucky hills, and he tells me of how Greeks watered down their wine before drinking it, and I tell him how my mother made moonshine and always left out a cup for the devil, and he tells me that there are and were other deities, not just gods but goddesses, who commanded worship from entire nations.

“You put me in mind of the statues of a goddess from Thrace,” he says at the end of the evening after several glasses of wine. “The seated ones with the spirals circling their loins. I have just such a one in my home that I wish you could see.”

I suppose I should be shocked. A man should not speak to a woman of her loins in public.

Instead, I feel a hunger waking inside me. A desire to know more. “What was she the goddess of?”

He tilts his head as if remembering a conversation he’d had with the goddess himself, raising a hand to stroke his beard thoughtfully, his eyes lighting as eager and clear as a child. “Why, my dear child, she was the goddess of everything.”

My breath catches. “But there is only one God,” I say, in case anyone else at the table is listening. It is one of the things I have learned to mimic, my devotion to the God of the preacher I killed. He is, after all, the fashionable god. Right now, we are speaking sacrilege, and so I try to temper it with the right words. “The Lord and his only son.”

Karl laughs, slapping his knee as if I’ve just told the best joke in the world. “My dear, he exists, it is true, but he had been a god a thousand times before the Christians got hold of him. Even before he ascended Olympus and then stole his way into Rome, he himself was but a wee babe trembling on the lap of his mother.”

“The Virgin Mary,” I whisper.

“Oh, no. Not just a virgin, her. The seated Thracian goddesses did not have bellies large with child, it’s true, but that is not because they were virgins. The spirals coming from their loins said that they contained life, yes, but they contained death too.” He lays a hand across mine. “Once upon a time, before her little son grew up and insisted she be a virgin or a whore, the goddess was all things. She was power itself.”

And then Reginald comes to collect me and we go to another game of cards, where, this time, he loses.

But I cannot stop thinking about the goddess.

And later that night he will force me out of my new gown, will tear it from off my back and throw it into the fire before digging out a worn one from my traveling trunk, still smelling of the animals the shepherdess tended before he paid her for it.

Or took it.

He will do all the cruel things he does, but I will not be there. I will be elsewhere, in the lap of a great goddess, lifted far and away on the rings of her spirals. Lifted into the skies, where I will transform.

Two years later, when I return to Frankfurt not as Alice, but as Belle, and sing at at a private performance for the crown prince of Prussia, Karl will be the only one to recognize me. I will see him, seated in the audience, with tears in his eyes.

Afterward—though I will have offers of fortunes from other men—I will choose to spend an evening for free with Karl. We will go back to his small townhome in the city center, and there he does not try to do what the others would but instead serves me a simple dinner of good wine and cheese before showing me all the statues of the goddesses he has collected in his travels as an archaeologist.

They come from all over the world. Goddesses with ten limbs and snakes for hair. Goddesses with bows and arrows at their side.

Goddesses with tigers.

And when, grateful for all that he has shown me, all that he has made me forget for those few simple hours, I try to kiss him, he pushes me gently away.

“If I were younger,” he says. And then, “You should find someone you love, Alice. Someone who worships you for all you are, the way the people who carved these statues worshipped the goddess in all her power before the world tried to tame her.”

“I have,” I whisper. “And lost him too.”

“You can never really lose something you love.” Karl smiles.

And now, with but an hour before the hanging, I say the first prayer of my life.

I say it to my own goddess. To the little gold woman on the rosary.

To Omisha.

And I beg her to keep safe that which I’ve chosen to give away.

48

The Hanging

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

Sunset is beautiful and bloody.

I take in its splendor for the last time as Brownie leads me, handcuffed, from the jail.

The prairie’s bone-dry air has baked the dirt, lifting dust from plowed fields to mask the sun, turning the sky’s light into a gory haze. The vermilion color drips over the heads of the crowd, so that we might be in a painting of Hell.

And ravens, dozens of them, circling like carrion in the sky.

The crowd has swelled in the night so that it covers the courthouse steps, spills down into the yard, and runs unfettered into the street. They have not noticed me yet. Brownie has brought me out quietly from a side door, and we slip through the crowd unnoticed.

In the near distance I see the Damned’s white tent rising in the sky. If I strain my ear I can even hear Dom, barking out the attractions while an organ grinder pumps out a tune. There is an excited shout, then a cheer as a body flies into the air.

One of the twins, trying to lure people into the tent where they will spend more money.

I wonder if Cash is out there too, to ensure that there is a way out, his gun ready to provide the same favor he gave Cal’s father.

Perhaps Cal is even standing beside him.

I press my bound hands against my breast and feel the outline of the bottle of holy water Dom gave me, laced with belladonna.

It is nearly half-gone. And I can only hope that I drank enough to numb the pain. Already I’m feeling sleepy.

Brownie nudges me forward, and for an instant, as we are swallowed into the sea of bodies, I think I smell him.

Oranges and cinnamon and sweet sweat born from love and hard work.

I never realized it before, but Cal smells very much like a tiger.

At the thought of Omisha, my heart clenches.

A soft breeze brushes across my face like a kiss, and in that instant the entire world seems to hold still.

As if I’ve stopped time.

Or, rather, traveled back into the moment when I had them both. Cal and Omisha.

And then the crowd realizes I’m there and the peace is shattered. An elbow to my ribs is followed by someone’s cackle and shouts from a man who is directing his little boy’s attention to me.

“There she is! There’s the devil that’s going to hang!”

“It’s her! It’s Belle King!”

Brownie tries to fend them off with the help of the two new young men. His eyes are determined, and I think again how much better of a sheriff he makes than Hicks ever did.

Poor Hicks with his ugly mustache and creeping hands.

Perhaps the worms have started to eat him by now. Nibbled the ugly mustache right off.

It’s a cheery thought for such a grim morning.

A gunshot sounds, and then another, and I flinch, ready for Cash’s bullet to bury itself in my skull.

But no, it’s Brownie’s gun fired into the crowd.

And for once, it is not an idle act. A man sinks to the ground, clutching the bright patch of red on his shoulder where he has been grazed. Just to its left is another spot of red tucked into his breast pocket. An admirer.

The sheriff has been right to fire. There are a dozen more men behind him, all of them ready to rush him and rescue me.

But the sight of their leader’s freshly spilled blood stops them.

“Anybody else wanna try?” Brownie’s voice is surprisingly clear. And strong. He no longer looks so old and frail. And I realize that perhaps I was not the only one who, all this time, has been pretending.

“Let’s go, Belle,” Brownie whispers in my ear. “If you want your hanging, you’d better get up on that platform before they kill you first.”

I had not thought that I would be afraid. But as I approach the gallows, a curl of fear flickers in my belly.

At the top of the steps, waiting, is the hangman. A black hood is covering his face, and he is holding a rope.

“Wait.” To his credit, Brownie stops beside me. I stand at the bottom of the stairs and listen.

There it is. The beginning trembling notes of the violin.

And then the Damned begin to sing.

It is the same song we sang at the start of every hanging.

A hymn, and because it is well known, sometimes those who watch the hangings sing it with us.

But the initial verse is sung alone, and I recognize Ama’s voice filling in where mine used to be. Loud and strong with no flourishes, but it holds with nary a quiver.

Fading away like the stars of the morning,

Losing their light in the glorious sun—

Thus would we pass from the earth and its toiling,

Only remembered by what we have done.

It is not a hopeful song. It is not a promise of forgiveness. But it is a song about life. About living and being remembered for good or for ill, the things we do in this life that last beyond us.

And sometimes, perhaps that’s all we can hope for.

Gently, Brownie guides me up the stairs, holstering his gun. There is no longer a need for it—I go willingly.

And now the chorus of the song begins and the crowd joins in.

Only remembered, only remembered,

Only remembered by what we have done;

Thus would we pass from the earth and its toiling,

Only remembered by what we have done.

The crowd feeds on the energy of the words, their message a condemnation and reminder both.

And now I am on the platform, the white of my dress, when I look down, a glaring mark against the pure blue sky.

“Are you ready?” Brownie asks. I’m not entirely surprised to see tears in his eyes. Unlike Hicks, Brownie is a good man, and there was always the matter of the hidden red in his breast.

Once upon a time I thought he might free me.

Now I’m glad he did not.

“I’m ready,” I tell him.

The hangman steps forward, the black hood hiding any expression. Then I feel the noose drop around my neck.

It is heavy. Far heavier than the diamond necklace or any other jewelry I’ve ever worn. Permanent. Inescapable. And in that instant, I wonder if it is how Omisha felt each time I forced her to walk back inside her cage and pretend she was the kind of tame creature she was not.

“Do you have any last words?” Brownie asks.

The Damned have stopped their singing.

The crowd below is so silent that I swear I can hear the sound of my own heartbeat. It is loud and strong and steady. I wonder if they can hear it too, these people who are waiting for it to stop.

I know what they want. My final words.

They want me to tell them where they can find the Queen’s Ransom.

And so I do. Facing them, I stand taller than I have ever stood before. I throw my chest back and make myself take up more space than a woman is allowed.

And when I speak, they cannot look away.

“If anyone wants me or my diamonds, they can find us both in Hell.”

The hangman steps forward toward the lever.

He looks at me. And through the hood I can see the glow of his eyes, one green and one brown.

It is the last person I’d ever expected to see.

Though I don’t know why. He is, after all, the hangman’s son.

How much he’s paid or who he’s killed to stand here, I will never know.

Our eyes meet, and I say his name a final time.

“Cash.”

And then the birds descend.

Hundreds of them.

All the ravens that have been circling fly down to cover me.

Dozens of feathered bodies press against me, coating me in their blackness, and the flap of wings beats the air around me until I cannot breathe.

Deadwood.

Cal’s final message to me, not a warning but a plan.

Hard beaks nudge into my sides like carefully controlled knives, seeking and finding the red ribbons I’ve sewn so carefully to the dress.

There is the feel of strong arms reaching around my waist.

And then the birds take hold, pulling tight as they rise into the air, and just as the floor drops beneath me, they lift.

For a single, perfectly timed second, I am flying.

Shouting, the hangman shoos them away.

And then, just as quickly as they arrived, they depart, disappearing in a black cloud that fills the sky, every eye following them.

The rope tightens around my neck, my legs kicking helplessly beneath me.

My body falls through the floor, and I am gone.

49

An Open Door

Now

Dodge City, Kansas

When I wake up, I am dead.

It is a comfortable feeling.

I am back in my Fisk coffin, its soft lining nestling my body like a mother’s womb.

Reaching down, my fingers skim the sides until I feel it. The small wooden hoop with a string attached. I take it between my fingers, feeling the perfectly smooth circle, sanded to perfection. My fingers worry it between them as the belladonna leaves my system just as it has dozens of times before.

I feel a jagged jolt of pain. Reaching my hand up—a tricky thing in such tight quarters—I tenderly feel my neck.

A raw necklace of chafed skin circles it.

But the real pain, I’m realizing, is coming from around my waist, where Cash hooked a rope into my belt after tying the noose around my neck, using the same thin stage rope that we used to control my wings.

That rope kept me from suffocating, but the birds saved me.

That single second they lifted me into the air kept my neck from snapping.

In my pocket is the rest of the belladonna from the bottle of holy water Ama slipped me, still full of the few mouthfuls I did not drink.

She’d given me enough to die if I wanted to. To escape the hangman’s noose another way.

I lift it to my lips and close my eyes. Just a single drink and I could sleep forever. Instead, I let it spill over the wound of my neck. Sometimes poison helps with the pain.

And, oh, there is so much pain.

Because Belle King is dead, but I am alive.

Me. Alice Springer.

I pull the string, and the lid creaks open.

For a moment, I am swallowed by more darkness, and I think that I really am dead. Then I sit up and feel the cool rush of air.

My eyes slowly adjust to a world of shadows, lit by a small slice of moonlight.

I am in a mausoleum. Lifting one leg gingerly over the edge, I slowly climb out of the coffin. There is a smell like a cellar, of dark things and wet, rotting leaves.

The dead line the walls, their coffins already tucked neatly inside the small holes on each side, like animals hibernating in their burrows.

Except these creatures will never wake. Not on this earth, anyway.

My coffin is directly in the center, on the raised marble platform that holds the freshest dead.

In the morning, when the crowds have gone, the groundskeeper will come with his crew and slide my tomb into the wall forever.

My feet hit the floor and I stand woozily.

There, just in front of me, is the light. It is coming from a single sliver beneath a door.

I go to it. There is no handle, so I press my palms against the cold stone and push.

It does not move.

I push again.

Nothing. The slab must weigh hundreds of pounds.

My heart speeds in my chest, and though I know it is only my imagination, I begin to feel that the air is less. That it is growing stale.

I pound harder, slamming my palms against it until they bruise.

I am furious.

After everything. After all I’ve done, to be trapped here. Forever. To never even make it to Hell…

The door swings slowly open, revealing a cold night sky full of stars.

And there, a single speck of light and the smell of tobacco.

A woman steps out of the shadows. “Told you I’d leave the door open for you.”

“Mary.”

It has been three years since I’ve seen her, but her voice—the one comfort I had through all the torment with Reginald as I imagined her speaking to me through her letters—is as familiar as ever.

But I hardly recognize her. Or, rather, I recognize her for the first time. It is Mary Parker as Mary Parker was always meant to be. As she always was.

Gone are the dowdy clothes she’d worn as a cleaner. Now she wears a smart dress of blue velvet, tailored perfectly to show off her graceful frame. And her face, uncovered by the hat, is open and smiling.

“You certainly do know how to make a scene, Miss Springer.” She grins. “Or should I call you Belle?”

“No. Belle’s dead. And you bought her one hell of a tomb.” I glance up at the enormous winged figure on top.

Mary shrugs. “Least I could do. Thought you’d appreciate the angel. But the coffin was a gift from your friend. He swore you’d need it.” Her lip curls into a smile. “Fellow with scars across his face. Figure that you must have met him.”

I laugh, then wince as the pain from the rope sears across my throat.

Mary’s face wrinkles in concern and then frustration. “Dammit, Alice. I thought you were dead! Why didn’t you just run when I gave you the chance? Didn’t that fool sheriff do as I asked?”

“He did,” I say. “But I wanted to hang.”

She shakes her head. “You never were one to take the easy way out.”

I smile. “No. But enough about me. Tell me about you. I see you’ve done quite well for yourself.” I stare appreciatively at the fine figure she cuts. “Stock market?”

Mary waves the suggestion away with one expensively gloved hand. “Oh, that’s old news. I use it when I must, but really there is only so much one can do when someone else is in control of your money.” She ashes her cigarette daintily onto the ground. “I’ve been more interested in real estate lately. Buying up whole blocks of buildings in California.” She smiles. “Amongst other things.”

“I’m happy for you.” The sounds of the breeze blowing across the open hill of the cemetery masks the choking sound I’m making as I search for words. Because how can I possibly tell her what her letters meant? What she means, standing here, all these years later? “Mary—” I begin.

“How about we get out of here?” She cuts me off. “People will be coming here to pay their respects…or disrespects…any minute now.” She removes the cigarette holder from her mouth and tucks it into a silk purse. “I’ve had to chase a few of them off already.”

“Where will we go?”

“Wherever you want,” Mary answers promptly. “But you must let me take you there. You can’t walk these streets without giving more than a few folks a fright. They’ll think you’re a ghost.”

Which is exactly the point. I did not mean to go on a hunted woman. By man or my own guilty conscience. If fate meant to keep me caged to a single story for the rest of my life, then I meant to rewrite it. Omisha never had that choice. I did.

Belle King had to die, one way or another, for me to be free. And after seeing the hanging, no one can doubt she is gone.

Mary leads me to a beautiful carriage waiting at the edge of the cemetery. It, like Mary, looks completely out of place in the rough-and-tumble streets of Dodge. The carriage is a four-in-hand—four breathtaking stallions with ink-black manes and a black carriage trimmed with brass.

I laugh at her audacity. “This is what you bring to a city of outlaws? You’re just begging to be robbed.”

“No,” says Mary. “I don’t think so.” Two men step out from behind the carriage.

They are more mountain than human. Even through their impeccable suits, I can see their muscles rippling. The men are both at least six feet tall, with matching mustaches that hide any expression their lips might make, and prominently displayed on the hip of each one is the gleaming silver of a pistol.

“Hans,” she commands one of them. “Please help Miss Springer into the carriage.”

The first man jumps to attention, and I take his hand as he helps me inside. Mary follows.

And then I tell her where to go. The carriage rattles into the countryside and away from Dodge.

When I finally tell her to stop, she gets out of the carriage with me to stand in the middle of the vast prairie night.

Then she pulls me close, just like she did all those years ago.

“You stay in touch, now. You hear me? I’ve gotten accustomed to our letters. And starting a new life can be hard.”

“Why are you helping me, Mary?” It’s uncharitable, but it has to be said. “You could turn me in,” I say. “Tell them I’m alive. I could even tell you where the diamond is. It’s worth a fortune.”

“I already have a fortune,” she says. “And besides, having you back out in the world is in my best interest.” Her grin grows wicked. “Killing rich men and all. You really cut down on my competition.”

I laugh. “My God, it’s good to see you.”

Her voice grows serious. “You too, Alice. Wasn’t sure you’d make it here. That hanging…” She shivers. “Then again, you always were clever.”

“Not as clever as you,” I say.

“No. But we made a pretty damned good pair in the end, didn’t we?”

“We did.”

Dead or not, being here with me is a risk. One she doesn’t need to take. “You don’t owe me any more favors, Mary. Understand? An open door, that was the deal. We’re even now.”

“No. I don’t do favors anymore,” Mary says, kissing my cheek. “But every now and then I don’t mind helping out a friend.”

50

An Admirer

Now

Hell’s Half Acre, Kansas

And then I am alone in Hell.

Mary leaves me to the night, and I embrace its quiet emptiness, stretching my arms high above my head to feel the freedom that surrounds me and wonder at its possibilities. Unlike the pressing walls of the jail cell or the smothering confines of the Fisk coffin, out here the sky and its endless stars tell me I could do anything. Go anywhere.

Or not.

I hear the click of a gun.

“Miss King.”

I turn around to find a man emerging from the shadows, though not at all the one I expected. His gun is pointed directly at my face.

“Brownie. What an unexpected pleasure.” The new sheriff stands straight and true, and though his face is lined, it is the weathered look of a man who has claimed his life and not one who has simply watched it pass by.

“Now, I assure you, Miss King”—he touches his hat—“as always, the pleasure is all mine.”

We are miles from another gun. A knife. Even the chicken bone I’d sharpened to a point with my teeth was left in Hicks’s neck.

There is just us. The man I’ve made sheriff and his gun.

“Where’s your lover?” Brownie’s limp is gone too. I see it when he moves with two quick feet to get a better position on me with the gun. A prop, I understand now. A way to make him look harmless, like someone’s old grandfather. Which, clearly, he is not.

“Let’s not talk about him now,” I say. “Let’s just focus on us. You and me.” My eyes scan the landscape for movement. Nothing. “How did you find me?”

“Well, now…” He fingers his hat, running the brim between his fingers. “You told me, didn’t ya? Told everybody where you was gonna be. Said you was going to Hell.”

“I didn’t think anybody would bother to listen.”

His voice is matter-of-fact. “I never did know you to lie. I believe in trusting folks who’ve earned it.”

I can’t help but smile. “That’s very good to hear. Now.” I take a step to my left.

His gun follows. The smile dies on my face. “Really, Brownie. I hope you aren’t planning on using that.”

“No, ma’am. Unless I have to.”

Not a comforting answer, all things considered.

And then I remember the peek of red in his breast pocket. My eyes shoot toward his heart, and yes, there—just barely visible—it is.

“Why are you really here, Brownie?”

He hesitates.

“You’ve got a red handkerchief, just like the others. Are you an admirer, Sheriff?”

His face flushes, the color rising all the way up to his ears, but it disappears so quickly I think I might have imagined it.

“I guess I am,” he says softly. “I admire any woman who stands up to men who don’t treat her right.”

“Then what are you doing all the way out here?” I say. “Why are you trying to catch me?”

“Because you still broke the law.”

Now I don’t move away from him but toward him. His hand wavers.

“Don’t come a step closer now, please,” he says. “I’d hate to have to do something we’d both regret.”

“As would I. So I ask you a final time. Why are you really doing this? Do you want the diamond? Is that it?” I feel a disappointment in him, but he shakes his head.

“No, ma’am. I don’t want the diamond. I want justice.”

There it is. Exactly what I’ve feared. I’m dealing with the rarest of creatures—a man who can’t be bought. “Ah, Brownie. I always thought I would like you, and now I’m certain that I do.”

“I like you too, Miss King. But that don’t change anything. I didn’t come to Dodge to be jailer or even sheriff. I’m a federal marshal. Catching you is the whole reason I’m here.”

“You are just full of surprises tonight.” I consider. “Is that why Hicks was so willing to believe Cal was a marshal too?”

Brownie nods. “I suspect so. The government sent a letter one of us was coming to help with the investigation. I guess it didn’t matter so much to the sheriff who it was.” His lip curls in disgust. “That fellow never were too bright.”

“No, but you are, aren’t you?” I say, beginning to understand. “When you came here and found someone in your place, you hired on as the jailer instead.”

“Had to get rid of the other fellow first, of course. Paid him a nice bit of money to get out of town so I could take his place.” He shrugs. “I figured jailer was the best place to figure out who the man pretending to be a federal marshal was and what exactly the two of you were up to.”

“But you let Cal go and you let me hang.”

“I didn’t mean to let him go,” he says. “Which is another reason I’m here. And as for your hanging, it could have gone two ways. Either you was really dead and justice was served or you’d lead me to the Birdman and I could arrest you both.”

“But I’m already dead.” I shrug. “Belle King is dead, Brownie. The whole world saw it. So why not just let me go? If you do, I promise you won’t ever hear from me again. All I want to do is be allowed to live the life that was stolen from me.”

He studies me, and I see his lips move around an invisible toothpick. “You know, Miss King…” He never drops the gun. Its silver muzzle keeps pointing directly at me, but his face breaks open into a rare smile. The effect is startling. He could be twenty years younger. Thirty. In another life and another time, I might have loved him. “You put me in mind of someone I used to know.”

“Who was she?”

“Oh, just a girl,” he says, and though his gun is steady, his voice is not.

“You loved her,” I say, understanding. “Oh, Brownie, I hope she loved you back.”

“She did,” he allows. “I guess that girl loved me more than anything.”

“Tell me about her,” I say. I want to keep him talking. But a part of me also wants to know.

“She looked like you,” he says. “Dark brown hair. Eyes that weren’t gold like yours but green.”

He reaches up to touch his breast pocket and the glint of red inside it, and now I understand. It’s not for me. Not really. It’s for her.

“What was her name?”

“Amy,” Brownie says, and his smile returns. “God, she were wild. Liked to give the men a devil of a time. Folks weren’t used to a girl acting like she did. She was a great horsewoman. One day she up and rode her mare into the church on a Sunday when the preacher was giving his sermon about women obeying their husbands.” His grin widens. “I was sitting right there in the front row with my parents. She asked if I wanted a ride. Said if I wanted to marry her, I had to be willing to let her take the reins every now and again too.”

“I like her already,” I say, and I mean it. But the time for stories is growing short.

The moon is climbing in the sky, and I wonder how much longer we can count on being alone. Dodge City is getting drunker by the minute, and soon celebrating the hanging won’t be enough. Soon, the diamond hunters will be at it again, searching for my last victim. Perhaps some of them might be clever enough to find him.

I can handle one man, but a mob is another story entirely.

Even so, I know that I must not rush him. The only way to win my way past Brownie is for him to let me go.

That or kill him.

“What did you do?” I ask. “When she rode into the church?”

“Why, I got on that horse with her,” he says. “And then I married her. A week later. It was the happiest day of my life. Hers too, I’d like to think.”

I wait. Because that is not all. Of course it’s not. Girls like his Amy are not allowed to be themselves without being punished.

“Then, one night, she went out riding alone.” Brownie glances up at the sky, as if remembering. “She said it was prettier then. Said she liked to ride by the light of the moon because she saw a world nobody else got to see.”

I swallow hard because I know what is going to happen. Of course I do.

“Some fellows saw her. Tried to rob her. To…take her. She fought back, of course, but that only made it worse. When I found her, she was already gone. Not a breath left.”

Tears stream down his face. “I should have stopped her.”

“No,” I say, my voice firm. “She should have been allowed to ride alone at night if she wanted to. A woman should be as safe by the moonlight as in the sun.”

He nods, roughly wiping away the tears from his face with the back of his free hand. “Yes. That’s just what she said.”

“You let her be her, Brownie. That was the best gift you could give her.”

Several seconds pass, and I swear I can hear horse hooves in the distance.

Brownie must hear them too, because he shakes his head as if clearing it. “Well, now. Guess it’s time we get you back to town.”

But he no longer sounds so certain.

“All those men I killed deserved it,” I say. “They were the same kind who took your Amy. Men who thought they could buy women.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right. Vigilantism is just another kind of way to break the law.”

“I didn’t say it was right,” I whisper. “But you said you wanted justice. Killing those men was just. The law isn’t made for women like Amy and me.”

Slowly, his arm drops to his side.

“Belle King is dead, Brownie. You’ve done your job.”

“If I let you leave, where will you go?” He looks at me, his ancient face as helpless as a child’s.

I shrug. “Somewhere. Anywhere. Wherever the hell I please.”

“And the Birdman?” His face hardens. “That man’s still a criminal.”

“I swear to you that that man has never harmed another in his life.” I cross the final step between. And, leaning over, I kiss the sweat-stained skin of the old man’s brow.

Slowly, he pulls the red silk from his pocket and wipes the tears from his eyes. “Go on, then,” he says finally. “Live for Amy.”

“I will,” I promise. “I’ll live for the both of you.” I kiss him a final time on his clean-shaven cheek.

“And for love, Brownie. Always for love.”

51

The Last Victim

Now

Hell’s Half Acre, Kansas

And all that is left is for me to find a dead man.

The only question is which one.

I left Cal everything he needed to be free. Money. An escape route. The world’s largest diamond just waiting for him inside a dead man’s chest.

All he had to do was take it and leave.

But of course, Cal never was good at leaving me.

I make my way to Frederick Fairchild’s grave, and there he is.

Standing in Hell is my Birdman, looking exactly as he did when we married. Minus the scars, of course. Beneath him is the reopened grave, just where I told him it would be.

“Alice.” He says my name like a prayer.

Cal has washed the black dye out, and the red-orange of his hair is as beautiful as the absent sun. Gone too is Reginald’s horrible suit and the knife and boots that Cal must have dived into the river for.

Yet still he is a wanted man. A criminal. An accused murderer.

And all of it. All of it for me.

“I told you not to come.” My heart is thudding.

“And I told you I’d do anything to save you.” His smile sends shock waves through me. I am the earth, and he is the quake that breaks me open.

And for the first time in years, I am able to smile back without worrying about who might see it. “God, I’ve missed you.”

“ ‘Missed’ isn’t a strong enough word.”

What I want to do is run to him. But it has been so long since we’ve had nothing between us that I want to savor the moment.

And I need him to understand why I did what I did. “The courtroom…” I begin.

He holds up his hand. “I know.”

“I just wanted you to be free. Not to keep worrying about saving me. I wanted to let you go, Cal. You are supposed to already be gone.”

“I’d never leave without you.” He is standing over the open grave, and there beside it is the prairie rock where I carved our names. I’ve used it as a tombstone for my final victim.

I wipe the tears from my eyes. “I see you found Frederick.”

“I did.” He nods. “You gave me very good directions. To all the bodies.”

And now I do go to him. “You fool!” I am pounding his chest with my fists. “Why did you try to save me? Why didn’t you just listen to me and take the diamonds? You could have started a new life!”

“Because I never wanted the goddamn diamonds, Alice.” His words are choked. “I wanted you. I have only ever wanted you.”

“Even after I sent you to jail?”

“And rescued me.” He grins. “Let’s not forget that. My ravens are clever, but they couldn’t have done all that on their own. Brought me a key. A rope. Left the window open.”

He holds me close, and his breath is warm against my face in the night-chilled air. I kiss him.

My husband.

And as I hug him, I feel a part of myself trying to return. His Alice, the girl who only wanted to marry him and dance with a tiger. But there is no tiger left. No Omisha. Or if there is, it is only the one inside of me.

“What were you thinking?” I pull back. “Pretending to be Reginald? What a ridiculous plan!”

He shrugs, grinning. “I figured if you could be a fancy opera singer, I could be a lawman. First place I went when I got out was to find that bastard’s body. I didn’t want no more trouble coming our way, so I went down to that river to make sure nobody could find him.”

“I’m shocked that nobody already had,” I say. “We weren’t very careful.”

“But we were lucky,” Cal says. “The flooding helped. He’d gotten stuck. The bastard was wedged into a catfish hole in the bank. The fish had been feeding on him so that he weren’t much more than bones. Saved his boots, though. And his knife. They were what gave me the idea.”

He tosses something to me, and I catch it. A rattling velvet bag. When I open it, I see the shimmer of two large diamonds mixed in with a pile of bones.

“Thought you might like to see him,” Cal says. “One final time. I put your baubles from the other fellows in there too.”

“Except for the earrings,” I say wryly. “Lucky Mrs. Price had those returned.”

“Well, now,” Cal allows. “Some things had to be sacrificed to get you free.”

“Careless,” I say, my voice choked. “Then again, you always were.”

I tighten my arms around his waist.

“You should be halfway to Mexico right now,” I murmur in his ear. “And I should be dead. That was the plan. I gave you every chance to be free.”

His breath comes heavier. More ragged. “I don’t want to be free. I want to be with you. Besides, with these diamonds we’ve got more than enough money to start a new life. A respectable one. Not a soul in the world will be looking for you now, and they won’t ever recognize me.”

I kiss him again, running my hands up his chest, down his stomach, to his belt, and there, pressed between us, my hand finds the bulge in his jeans.

He groans as I remove his gun.

“What are you doing?” He pulls away, just barely.

Everything I told him was true. I had tried to set him free.

But I also knew him. Knew him better, in some ways, than I knew myself.

Maybe I gave him a chance to be free knowing he’d never take it.

Maybe I always knew he would save me instead.

Maybe I left the diamonds for him to collect while I went to the gallows knowing that I’d never die.

That Cal wouldn’t let me.

And that afterward, when the world thought I’d been hanged, I’d be a free woman once again.

All except for one thing.

One man.

“Alice.” Cal’s voice is not worried. Not yet. But there is an edge to it. “Give me back my gun, honey.”

“You forgot the most important one,” I say, nodding to the open grave. “The Queen’s Ransom. You haven’t collected it yet.”

The smile returns to his face. “Well, now, I was just getting to it when you showed up. You’re an awful sort of distraction.”

“As are you.” I run my tongue across my lips. I have to force myself from going to him. And this time, when I speak, it’s my breath that’s ragged. “Go on, then. Let me keep lookout while you crawl in there and get the diamond.”

He nods. “I’ll be quick about it. Just holler if you see anyone.”

“I will. You focus on getting that last diamond.”

And, God help him, he does.

Without so much as a glance at me, Cal heaves himself down next to the corpse.

In the moon’s glow, Frederick’s body is fully revealed. There’s nothing pretty about him anymore. His once-beautiful face has rotted away, his hair and nails grown long in the grave he dug for himself.

Cal unbuttons the poor boy’s shirt to reveal the perfectly stitched chest, withered now and gaping. Without flinching, he pulls open the black thread with his fingers and reaches in to grab the Queen’s Ransom.

“Big old thing,” he says. Never a mention of the heart I’ve removed to put it there. The lives I’ve taken.

Reaching up, he hands it to me—the world’s largest diamond.

I’d forgotten how beautiful it was. How heavy. It fits in my palm like an egg, its surface perfectly cut to show its flawless interior, which captures and holds the light.

It’s solid enough to crack a man’s skull.

I shove it into the velvet bag of Reginald’s bones with the other two diamonds and lay the bag gently on the ground beside my feet.

One husband in a bag and the other in a grave at my feet.

The wind has begun to pick up now, and it’s like the open earth is talking to me.

It or Kate Bender.

I’m ready, it says. Waiting. I’m just a hole in a ground that’s already full of ghosts. What difference could one more dead man possibly make?

Cal reaches up to take my hand.

I stretch it toward him.

And with the other one, I lift the gun.

52

The Beginning

Now

Hell’s Half Acre, Kansas

This is how you want the story to end. You want love.

It’s how stories go, after all. The wicked are punished, the good triumph.

Women who ask for freedom are told that love is better.

But let me ask you this. Why do you need that ending?

Why are you so afraid that a man’s life will be sacrificed in the name of a woman’s freedom?

Because he is a good man?

Yes. Cal is more than good. He is kind and honorable and true.

But so too are the dozens of girls who failed in their quest for some fairy tale the world promised them. A fool’s errand of love and marriage and children.

So were a thousand girls who never even got to dream at all, who lost the part of themselves that knew what they wanted.

So are a million women all over the world who lose pieces of themselves each day to something they call love.

And yet still you believe in it. Still you yearn for me to do the right thing. To fall in love and save Cal.

But what if, after all these years, I want to save myself?

What if I do not believe that a man’s love is the only answer?

What if I am willing to sacrifice someone other than me?

I see you squirming in your chair, dear reader. I see you calling out as you imagine the shape of my cold gun pressed against Cal’s forehead. The smooth feel of metal against my trigger finger.

No! you cry. Don’t do it.

But it is not me who brought him here. It is not me who decided to go against the king’s wishes in the story. To steal something that was not his to claim.

Because remember, my loves. In this story, I am the King.

I am the one who decides who lives or dies.

And yet still the fool stands there in front of me.

Still he does not move to stop me even as he sees the raised gun. Still he whispers, “I love you.”

My finger itches on the trigger. It is but a simple thing, a simple gesture, a beckoning toward what lies beyond.

Perhaps I should turn the gun upon the wicked Belle King.

But remember, Belle is already dead.

She was hanged and buried in front of a crowd of hundreds in the lawless cow town of Dodge City.

No, this is not Belle, this is me. Alice Springer.

It has always been me. And I no longer need to tear myself into pieces to please the world. Give my shadow a stage name to become who I’ve always been.

I choose light.

And I choose dark.

You don’t have to like me. You just have to acknowledge I exist.

A single strand of carrot-colored hair blows across the constellation of freckles scattered across Cal’s face.

There is an entire universe there, waiting to be discovered.

Or to implode.

“You can’t save me,” I say, because he should at least know why before I make my decision. “I don’t want to be saved.”

And then, there, that smile. The one that splits me in two.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he says. “I haven’t been trying to save you. I’m trying to save myself.” His eyes burn, bright as any star. Brighter. “I don’t mean anything without you, Alice. If you’re gone, everything I did, good or bad, it’s just nothing.” His voice breaks. “Everything we did, we did because there wasn’t any choice. And I won’t ever judge you. Mistakes aren’t mistakes when it’s love.”

My palms grow sweaty. My heart leaps in my chest.

In one hand, a way out. In the other, the gun.

And yet still he smiles. While over in the distance, I see the shimmering orange shape of something I thought was dead.

There are two futures waiting for us on top of this grave. Two doors Cal can open.

But the decision is all mine. And, nodding my head ever so slightly, I make it.

And so I ask you. Which did he find…

The lady or the tiger?

Epilogue

A Love Story

I told you this is a Love Story.

But it is not mine. It is yours.

I wrote it for you.

For all the girls with tigers in their hearts.

If you know nothing else, know this—

You are worth more than all the heroes and their guns.

More than the diamonds and dresses and lambs’ masks in which they try to keep you.

More than their endless fairy tales of teenage kisses offered as the final prize.

Tell your own goddamn story.

Make your own happy ending.

And if you need the lady, take her.

But if you want the tiger, she’s yours too.

Your rage is as holy as your love.

Your shadow as beautiful as your light.

Don’t kill a part of yourself just to become someone else’s story.

Stay hungry, my daughters.

Now go out and eat the world.

—Belle King (deceased)

Author’s Note

Westerns as a genre have long held a fascination for me, most probably because I was raised in Kansas, not too far from some of the more infamous frontier towns of the “Wild West.” My own ancestors came to settle the state in the 1800s, including Volga Germans on my father’s side—religious exiles who first settled in Russia for a hundred years before coming to the United States—and German farmers and Scotch-Irish and English tradesmen on my mother’s. As a child, I would often sit on the porch of my family’s homestead, land that had been farmed by them for over a hundred years, while my grandmother told me stories about what it was like when our family first arrived. While she talked, we would rock on the old porch swing, gazing out at a sea of wheat as I imagined what it might have been like then. My father’s family had their own stories, even swearing that we were related to Belle Starr. Those tales sparked my imagination, and in school, I devoured any historical fiction or classroom lesson set on the prairie.

Of course, what I was taught about the United States was, in some ways, as much of a fiction as this book. America’s attitude of Manifest Destiny assumed a tabula rasa. However, the land was not a blank slate at all, but already full of rich cultures and civilizations long before white settlers, including my ancestors, arrived and the cow towns of the Old West first drew breath. I have tried to acknowledge that in this book, but I’d also like to acknowledge it here. The lands on which I stamp this story are, first and foremost, Native American ones. The Kansa, Kiowa, Osage, Pawnee, Comanche, and Ute in Dodge City, Kansas. The Apache, Comanche, and Kickapoo in Colorado City, Texas. The Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Jicarilla Apache, Lipan Apache, Ute, and Pueblos in Las Vegas, New Mexico. The Muscogee in Atlanta, Georgia. The Jumanos, Comanche, Lipan Apache, and Kickapoo in Abilene, Texas. And the Crow, Cheyenne, and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ in Deadwood, South Dakota.

The history I learned in school also mostly ignored the stories of women. The Western genre, an outshoot of this myopic history, does the same, and young women are given the role of a faithful companion or the prize to be protected and avenged by a rugged, wounded cowboy. Often, a girl’s death is simply a catalyst for that hero’s own story.

But the women my grandmother told me about on that swing had their own stories worth telling. They were their own heroes. And I wrote this book not only to center a young girl in a genre that has largely ignored them, but to let her be as wild and wicked as any of the Wild West’s men.

Because the truth is, those women did exist. We do exist. Both as outlaws and heroes. Sarah Winnemucca, Laura Bullion, Mary Fields (Stagecoach Mary), Eleanor Dumont, Katherine Horony (Big Nose Kate), Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, Tye Leung, Annie Oakley, and Mary Ellen Pleasant (on whom this story’s Mary Parker is based). The list goes on and on of women who shaped our country and the Wild West. I beg you to do your own research. Read their complex and beautiful stories. There are so many just waiting for others to discover and tell.

In writing places or actual events, I have tried to remain as historically accurate as possible. However, in the interest of plot, some things have been intentionally changed.

Dodge City really was known as the wickedest little town in the West, but the cattle drives dried up in 1886, and the town’s reputation as the “Deadwood of Kansas” died with it. For this story, I’ve allowed it to stay wicked just a little while longer.

Institutions for women such as the one where Alice was sent were also real, and horrible practices including experimentation and sexual abuse did happen. And places like this for women of color were often even worse. While I did not include the latter on these pages, I want to acknowledge their existence and the pain and trauma they inflicted.

Cheyenne, Wyoming, did in fact allow women to vote far before the country as a whole. This progressive little city also had electric lights earlier than most and would have had them when Alice and the Damned first came through, but I left them out here to let Deadwood shine a little brighter.

Paula Angel was an actual woman who was hanged for the death of her lover, though I have changed the details and date of her death, moving it forward in time from 1861.

Finally, the Bloody Benders were a real family of murderers, including young Kate. Hell’s Half Acre is real too, also known as the Bender Mounds, but I’ve moved it closer to Dodge by a couple hundred miles.

And a closing note that should not be read unless you have finished the book.

I want to talk about Omisha.

I know that readers are likely to be angry at my decision concerning her fate. And I don’t blame you. Killing an animal in a story is often a cheap trick used to get a scare or draw a tear. I assure you, that was not my intention. Rather, in a world that often seems more outraged by the hurt done to an animal, even a fictional one, than the horrible things done to women and girls each day, I believe Omisha’s death is a sacrifice worth making in order to bring these things to light.

Because the injuries and assaults that girls face are not fiction. The pieces of themselves we ask them to kill in order to be accepted and loved are very, very real. The rage and pain that we insist they swallow are, I believe, a power just waiting to manifest. As psychologist Carl Jung said, “The shadow is ninety percent pure gold.” Girls and women deserve to be whole. And until we claim our dark, how can we ever claim our light?

On that note, this story is not just an answer to the Western genre but the Young Adult one as well, a market that is directed mostly at teenaged girls and young women. And while said genre contains many wonderful, empowering books, it also, I believe, often holds a hidden message that romance is the ultimate goal for its heroines. This book is my response to a world and industry that too often claims a happily ever after starts with someone else.

I want more for you.

For us.

Don’t mourn Omisha; bring her back to life. She is still inside you. Ready.

Teeth and claws of gold, just waiting to be released.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my tireless agent, Barbara Poelle, who continues to champion my writings about dangerous women (it helps that she is one herself), and to my wise editor, Caitlin Tutterow, who patiently guides my sometimes wayward characters. Additional thanks to all the talented people at Nancy Paulsen Books and Penguin Young Readers Group for both bringing this book to life and helping it find its readers. Eileen Savage, Kristin Boyle, Emily Rodriguez, Kim Ryan, Felicity Vallence, Shannon Spann, Alex Garber, and Shanta Newlin: I am eternally grateful for your talents.

Many people also read early drafts of this novel, acted as a sounding board for ideas, or simply helped me feel like an actual writer when I was struggling. Kerri Maniscalco, Kyle Tipton, Kate Tsang, Dr. Rich Ryan, Jasmine McGee, Lauren Genovesi, and the whole Santa Fe Ladies’ Night crew, thank you. You gave me the confidence (and sometimes tarot readings) to continue when I needed it most.

And to my family. My mother, Alice, my sister, Jessica, and my father, Frank—who is, I have no doubt, telling everyone in heaven’s YMCA about his daughter’s new book. And Tish, Jim, and Liz, I love you.

And finally to Albert, Charlie, and Parker: Life with you is better than any story I could ever write.

About the Author

Heather Herrman’s fiction blends beauty and the macabre. She loves prairie winds, tales of wicked women, and landscapes that look like they could eat you. She holds an MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University and is an active member of the Horror Writers Association. Heather currently lives outside Dallas, Texas.

What’s next on
your reading list?

Discover your next
great read!

Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

Sign up now.

_151561850_