Frank held his hands out, palms down. “Hey, there,” he said, his voice cracking a bit, which was totally embarrassing in front of Annie, but that was definitely not what he should be focusing on right now. “What’s going on?”
Jane leaned over and said out of the side of her mouth, “What’s going on is he’s got a gun pointed at Charlie!”
Frank woooed softly, keeping his eyes on the boy. This was no time to lose his nerve. “You look frightened, which makes me think you don’t want to be doing this.”
“I have to,” the boy said in a shaky voice. His hands were trembling so violently that Frank was afraid the six-shooter would go off by accident.
“Why do you think you have to?” Frank kept his voice even, but his heartbeat was thunder in his ears. In the back of his mind, so far back it was most likely reflex at this point, he imagined all the things that kept him calm: wind in tall grass, the gentle dance of fireflies, and the sun sinking lower in the sky.
Tears streamed down the boy’s cheeks. “He said they would tell everyone I was a garou. And if that happens, no one will give me a job. My family will starve. I’m the only one able-bodied enough to earn money.”
“Who said that?” Frank asked.
The boy shook his head.
“I recognize you,” Frank said. He took a tentative step toward the window, and the boy flinched. Jane and Annie both flinched, too. “You were at the factory that night, right?”
The boy didn’t respond. He just shook.
“I think you were. I know you’re going through a very hard time right now.”
“A hard time? A hard time?” The boy howled in despair. “A week ago, I was normal. Now I’m a garou. My life is over. There’s no way to keep it a secret. My mother is a cripple. My father is gone. And I guess I’m about to commit murder.”
“Or, maybe, as an alternative, you don’t commit murder,” Frank said. He took another step. “You saw us at the factory. You know we’re the good guys.”
“Yeah,” Jane said. “We’re, like, the revengers.”
Frank’s heart was breaking for this boy. He was so scared, so young, and had no one to take care of him. “We can help you,” he said, soothingly. “But if you kill Charlie . . . well, there’s no coming back from that. And what’s to stop whoever from threatening you again?”
The boy’s shoulders slumped, and he lowered the six-shooter. Frank closed the distance and gently took the gun out of the boy’s hand. Without looking, he passed it behind him to Jane, who carried it out of reach.
“Come inside and talk to us,” Frank told the boy. “We’ll figure it out.”
The boy started to climb through the window.
“Oh,” Frank said, “I meant through the door— Oh, okay, you’re in.”
The boy sank into the chair in the corner of the room. Frank and Jane (sans six-shooter) went to his side. Annie stayed by the door.
“Who threatened you?” Frank asked.
“A man in a carriage. He stopped me on the street.”
“Did you know the man?” Frank asked.
The boy shook his head.
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“He was wearing a hat.”
“A hat?” Annie repeated. “What kind of hat?”
“One of those fancy hats. A top hat.”
Frank and Jane exchanged a look.
“Did you see his face?” Frank asked.
The boy shook his head. “It was too dark.”
Frank frowned. “I know it was dark, but hasn’t it been said . . . that . . . garou can maybe see really well in the dark?”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” the boy said.
“I think it sure sounds true,” Jane said.
“I was just so frightened. I didn’t even look at him.”
“Well, that makes it more difficult on our end,” Frank said. “Was he tall? Short?”
“I don’t know.”
Frank was beginning to think this boy wasn’t going to make a very good garou. He pulled some bank notes out of his pocket. “I’m betting this nondescript man happened upon you on the street and seized an opportunity. But I’m here to tell you that you can live a good life as a garou. You can learn to master it. It is not the end of your life.”
The boy pocketed the bills and nodded. “I guess I can try. Should I take the gun?”
Frank raised an eyebrow. “Uh, that’s a hard no. You can take the door on your way out, though.”
The boy shuffled toward the door, and Annie gave him a wide berth. He paused with his hand on the doorknob.
“The man did have a strange smell,” the boy said. “Like peppermint mixed with . . . moonlight.”
With that he left.
Annie looked incredulous. “You’re letting him go?”
Frank nodded. “Just because he was bitten doesn’t make him bad.”
“He almost murdered your friend.”
“He was scared,” Frank said. “The more pressing issue is who was at this factory turning all these people, to what end, and what the heck does moonlight smell like?”
Jane raised her hand. “Oh, oh, the reason we came here. There was a second garou at the factory.”
So she’d claimed before, but—
“How do you know?” Frank asked.
Jane scratched her chin. “Well, that’s a mite difficult to explain.”
“I was there and I saw everything and I shot the first garou,” Annie said. “But I did not shoot the second one.”
“So, maybe it’s not that difficult to explain,” Jane said.
“You were at the factory?” Bill’s voice came from the doorway.
“Yes.” Annie stepped aside to make room for him to enter.
“And to further catch you up,” Frank said, “one of the boys from the factory was blackmailed into trying to kill Charlie. We talked him down. The blackmailer wore a top hat, but the boy didn’t get any further description, except he smelled of peppermint and (ahem) . . . moonlight.”
At this Bill tilted his head. “There are a lot of things going on here.”
“I know,” Jane said. “Lots of threads. We’re not used to plots with any complexity.”
Bill looked at Charlie. “You feelin’ okay?”
Charlie nodded. “I mean, my leg hurts, and not five minutes ago there was a gun aimed at my head, but now we’re back down to just my leg hurting.” He gave a wry smile. “So yeah, I’m fine.”
Bill sighed. “I want to go check out a new lead.”
“What new lead?” Frank said.
“It’s not something that’s even worth talking about yet,” Bill said. “I’ll go at it on my own. Jane, look after the horses. Frank, you and . . . Annie”—at the sound of her name, Annie stood up straighter, as she always did—“go practice for the show.”
“Okay,” Frank said, standing straighter himself, because he had talked the boy out of killing Charlie and now he was going to practice sharpshooting with Annie, and ever since she’d beaten him in that contest . . . Well, let’s just say his heart had gone boom.
As they walked to their homemade shooting range behind the livery, Frank said, “I can’t believe you followed us to the factory. You’ve got to be more careful.”
“Oh, I was very careful as I shot that garou who was about to kill you.”
Frank was embarrassed to admit he felt relief that he hadn’t killed the garou. So he didn’t admit it.
“And I didn’t get so much as a thank-you,” Annie said with a grin.
Frank’s pulse started to race, and he wasn’t sure whether to attribute it to the fact that she’d saved his life or the fact he liked her smile.
“I’m so excited to be in the show,” Annie said as they reached the practice area. “Oh, George!”
George was dashing toward them. Frank crouched down to welcome him, but the poodle darted around him and leapt into Annie’s arms.
“Who’s a good boy?” she said.
Is it me? George thought.
“You’re a good boy.”
Yay! It’s me! George responded.
She set George down, and he immediately flipped over onto his back, exposing his belly for rubbing. Annie obliged, scratching him in just the right spot as to cause his left leg to twitch.
Up until now, George had only done the leg-twitch thing with Frank. But Frank wasn’t jealous. Because George was a dog and Frank was a man and man had no reason to resent dog and George was like a brother and he was most loyal and why did he like Annie better than Frank?
But then Frank looked at Annie. She was wearing another simple, formfitting dress, with a matching bow in her hair and buckled shoes that boasted a recent shine job. Of course George had leapt into her arms. Right now, Frank wanted to leap into her arms.
Annie stood up and ran her hand over her skirt, even though Frank couldn’t see one darn wrinkle.
They stared at each other in silence, Annie with a half smile and Frank with a full smile.
“Shall we begin?” Annie said.
“Gosh, sure,” Frank said articulately.
They spent the next few hours coming up with a routine for Annie’s act in the show.
“That’s enough warm-up,” Annie said when they were done. “Let’s start the competition portion of the afternoon.”
Frank considered this to be the best first date in the history of first dates. “How will we keep track of the score?” he said. “Should we make notches in that tree?”
“No need to harm a tree,” Annie said. “Let’s keep track another way. How about if each time one of us can’t copy a shot, we get a letter of a word. And when one of us, mostly you, finishes spelling the word, he—or she, but mostly he—loses.”
Frank chose to ignore her hubris on account of she was just so darn likable.
“What word shall we use?” Frank asked.
“Um . . .” Annie glanced at the stables. “How about horse?”
And thus, dear readers, the very first game of H-O-R-S-E was played. Of course, now the game uses trick basketball shots instead of trick gun shots, and this change is probably a good thing, because no one was as good at shooting as Frank and Annie, and therefore if other people tried to replicate the game, there would be blood.
Anyway, back to this delightful scene of a boy and a girl, flirting with the rules of propriety and shooting guns at each other.
It was a tight game. At one point, Frank did his signature move of standing on his head and shooting at the target using a mirror. Annie followed suit. So did her skirt. She made the shot, but not before Frank caught the briefest glimpse of her leg. The left one.
He got very quiet.
“What did you think of that?” Annie said triumphantly.
“It was . . . I mean . . . ,” Frank stammered.
At that moment, bells rang from some distance away.
“I can hear the bells,” Frank said.
“Me too,” Annie said.
The longer they stared into each other’s eyes, the louder, and clearer, the bells got.
“Do you remember that one time you did that flip thing and shot the gun with your big toe?” Frank said.
“The thing I did five minutes ago? Yes, I remember.”
“I thought that was just the darndest thing.”
The bells were really loud now. So loud that Frank began to wonder if maybe they weren’t ringing for him and Annie. They were getting closer, and now they were accompanied by the sound of hoofbeats and the commotion of a speeding wagon.
Realization dawned on Frank. “It’s the fire wagon!”
“Yes,” Annie said, looking as if that were the last thing she’d expected him to declare.
“George loves them!” Frank exclaimed.
But it was too late. The truck rounded the corner and passed the range, and George went madly barking after it. Frank ran after him. He’d seen this happen before, and sometimes George ended up miles away. It was like fire wagons were dog hypnotists.
“Come back!” he shouted. But neither dog nor truck listened, let alone obeyed.
Frank ran and ran until he thought he’d collapse. He stood bent over on the dirt road, breathing heavily.
Annie caught up to him seconds later, not breathing hard at all.
“Mr. Butler, are you okay?”
Frank was still gasping for air. “It might take me hours to find him.”
Annie cupped her hands to her mouth. “George! Here, boy!”
“That’s . . . never . . . going . . . to . . .” Frank panted.
He didn’t get to finish the sentence because George was back.
“It worked,” Frank said.
“I have a way with animals,” Annie said.
Frank had always thought he was the one who had a way with animals.
Annie patted Frank’s back. She was either consoling him or trying to help him breathe.
There was just something about this girl that spun his head around. When he’d watched her shoot, he’d felt like he’d been struck by lightning. So proper, so accurate, so prim, and yet she could shoot the shell off a snail, and the snail would crawl away unharmed.
He liked her. He liked that fierce gleam in her blue eyes. That stubborn set to her jaw. The way her lips pursed slightly when she was making a decision.
Her lips were doing that cute thing right now, as a matter of fact.
(We pause here, dear readers, to acknowledge that insta-love is a literary trope too often used. But history is on the side of this particular connection. When the real Annie beat Frank Butler in that sharpshooting competition, his heart had skipped a beat, and he really did wonder if she was the girl he was going to marry. It was love at first shoot. You can look it up.)
“Mr. Butler?” Annie said, and for the first time since he’d met her, she sounded out of breath.
“Miss Mosey,” he murmured. Her skin was like porcelain. Tan freckly porcelain.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Ask me anything,” he breathed.
“What is the Alpha?”
“Huh?” Frank felt like she’d dumped cold water on him.
“What is the Alpha?” Annie asked again. “You all seem very worried about finding it.”
“Right.” Frank struggled to redirect his brain to the job. He wasn’t sure about how much he should share with her. But as long as she was part of their group, he supposed it was all right. “The Alpha popped up a couple of years ago, organized the garou into the Pack, and now they go around biting people. As you’ve seen.”
“All this time and you haven’t caught him yet?” Annie frowned, as though she’d have found him the instant she heard the name.
“Most people don’t know anything about him—not even most garou. Trying to find information about the Alpha is like trying to find . . .” He paused, failing to come up with an apt simile.
“Like trying to find a needle in a haystack?” Annie provided.
“Yes. That’s precisely it.”
“Thanks.” She smiled broadly. “I’m the best at coming up with similes in my whole family.”
Frank believed that.
“So this Alpha,” she prodded.
“Well, we’ve been chasing him for a while, but the trail went cold a couple towns ago, so we came to Cincinnati to do our show and make some money. It was pure luck that Jack McCall happened to have information on the Alpha. Well, sort of. He said Mr. Badd might be the Alpha, but clearly that wasn’t true. Still, we have leads now.”
Annie nodded thoughtfully. “Very interesting. So this Alpha is bad, but not Mr. Badd. And the Alpha’s not the top hat man either, although the top hat man seems to be more important in the Pack than Mr. Badd.”
“Exactly.”
“But the top hat man might lead us to the Alpha.”
“That’s the hope,” Frank said tonelessly. Yes, it would be great to have this hunt over with, and the evil Alpha off the streets, but that meant Bill would leave the show—and therefore Frank—to settle down with Agnes.
Bill deserved to settle down.
But if they found the Alpha and put an end to the Pack, it would be a bittersweet victory.
Annie didn’t notice his melancholy. “So tell me more about the garou.”
“Oh, okay.” Frank could hardly believe she had more curiosity left in her after that interrogation.
“Just for research,” Annie went on, “since I intend to pull my weight in hunting the Alpha. Do garou have exceptional eyesight?”
“Yes, from what I’ve seen,” he said warily.
“And do they have unprecedented hearing?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s what I’ve heard, if there is something interesting they want to listen to,” Frank said.
“So, this book I’ve read three times—Fearsome Garou and Where to Find Them—says that garou have a kinship with wolves. It speculates that garou can communicate with wolves, and maybe even dogs.”
George glanced up at Frank, his tongue lolling out. Is she talking about me? he thought.
Frank squeezed his eyes shut and scratched the back of his head.
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Also, it says garou are colorblind.”
“Um,” Frank said. “I think they can see some colors, but not like humans see them.”
“Right!” Annie nodded enthusiastically. “So a garou wouldn’t be able to tell what color dress I was wearing.”
Frank really hoped she wouldn’t ask him what color her dress was. It looked sort of gray-yellow, with some blue in there, but who could say, really?
Annie whipped a short pencil out of her pocket and a blank book. She started scribbling everything down.
“The book claims garou can run fast,” Annie said.
“Now that I can answer: not all of the time.”
“Hmm,” Annie said. “I guess the book was wrong about that. There’s one other thing. Jane told me that it’s really hard to kill a garou, and that it takes special kinds of bullets. Silver bullets.”
“Oh.” A pit formed in Frank’s stomach. This conversation was definitely taking a dangerous turn. “Yes, that’s true.”
“That sounds expensive!”
He nodded, imagining sunsets again. “That’s why we put on so many shows: to pay for the silver.”
“Ah,” Annie said, writing that down. “Good time to own a silver mine, I suppose.”
“That’s dark,” Frank said.
“I bet it is dark in mines, yes. But the silver is undeniably needed now. I should get some silver bullets of my own. Where do I buy them? Or will I have to make them myself?”
Frank’s heart kicked. Sunsets weren’t really working. Why couldn’t they go back to talking about bells? “Charlie can help you with that. Or Bill.”
Annie nodded and made another note. “Great. I’ll talk to them.”
“Annie?” He meant to call her Miss Mosey, but her Christian name slipped out. It felt right.
She looked up, her eyes expectant. “Yes . . . Frank?”
“You seem really excited to hunt garou,” he said.
“Oh, I am.” She closed her notebook and put it in her pocket. “They frighten me, Mr. Butler—I mean Frank.” Her cheeks darkened. Were they pink to other people? “Garou are so much more powerful than we are. It’s terrifying what they can do. I don’t trust them.”
“I see.” Frank knew as well as anyone how dangerous garou could be. After all, he’d been hunting garou for years—and helping them, too. Like that boy in Charlie’s room, and the others from the factory. Those garou hadn’t done anything wrong. They’d been scared. But Annie wanted to hunt all of them. “Why?”
“Why what?”
Frank steeled himself and forced out the question. He didn’t really want to know the answer, but he needed it. “Why do you want to hunt garou so badly?”