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“The plan is what, we find this mine, get inside and then what?” Wolfe said.
Kaltenbach still thought of him as Black Wolf, the rogue fledgling so young he had tasted like human blood when she drank from him in a show of dominance. Kaltenbach wasn’t sure if she was glad she hadn’t killed him. Sometimes that came back to haunt a person.
“Reconnaissance only,” Kaltenbach said.
The night was clear and moonless, with a faint breeze from the northwest bringing warmer air but no hint of rain. The monsoons were still weeks away. She smelled the creosote, the dust, and the faded smell of horses long gone. Beyond that; the house which would be theirs. She knew what Black Wolfe didn’t know, that they had one shot to get this right, to seize the house, kill Eric if necessary. Kill people and take their property. Wasn’t that the American way? The twin halves of her ancestry warred with one another. One the victor, the other the spoils of war. Not for the first time, she wondered what would have happened had her mother’s people been victorious. Would she still be a vampire? Would she still live? What would this land look like had her father’s people not come with their trains and guns and broken treaties and cavalry? Perhaps she was more the daughter of his people, with her lust for blood, her hard edges.
“Nice night for breaking and entering,” Wolfe said, too loud, like a human.
Kaltenbach glanced up at him, dark silhouette against the impossible quilt of stars. He’d cleaned up from the ragged and greasy man she had once battled in an alley that night with her former master’s Dayrunner and her boyfriend who smelled wrong. Wolfe had come slinking back when El Patron showed up, skulking and cringing at first, but soon acting arrogant as his fear subsided. Wolfe had started shaving his head on the sides, short on top in a military cut. He wore military surplus jackets and cargo pants, which occasionally awarded him an approving nod from some of the more conservative men in town, but she remembered when he was literally feeding off of scraps. How many times did she and Fain discuss the wisdom of keeping him alive? How many times had it come down to a thin margin? Medina understood, at least, that she was living on borrowed time, that she had a quickly burning candle to prove herself worthy before it sputtered and grew dark.
But Wolfe stood arrogant and proud with his hands in his pockets, looking around at the enemy territory spread out in the valley below him as if deciding whether or not it was worth seizing. He was of her father’s people. He would have been one of those smashing babies’ heads with the butt of a rifle to save bullets, then writing home to their virginal brides to brag of subduing the savages.
She surveyed the topographical map and the compass in her hand, barely glinting in the starlight. It should be here somewhere. She peered out into the darkness and saw it. There. Under the rock cairn.
“This is a waste of time,” Wolfe said, cutting the silence with his human-loud voice.
Kaltenbach pointed at the cairn. “Remove the rocks,” she said in a whisper.
Her father’s people would have found an excuse to kill him, she thought, as Wolfe managed to remove the rocks with far more noise than necessary. Maybe Steel Fang’s people would catch them, and she would be able to flee, all apologies to El Patron. So sorry, sir. Unavoidable losses. He was too weak, too slow. El Patron was of the victor’s people. The blue-eyed devils had no patience for weakness. She also had little tolerance for weakness. She had inherited that along with her strong jaw and her fair hair.
And if Wolfe were not too weak to die by Steel Fang’s hand, she had a knife and the experience of thousands of nights spent hunting silently in the darkness, with only her wits and the starlight to guide her. It was the desert that had drawn her as much as the promise of a place on the new Guild Council. Out here the spirits of the land still remembered their people. Sometimes the spirits wanted a sacrifice.
“Hot damn,” he said. An orange sign reading ‘caution’ lay horizontal over the ground, resting on old timbers mummified in the darkness. He tapped on it. “Sounds hollow to me.”
He lifted off the sign, revealing a pit of absolute blackness, a dark eye slit with a cross beam. The starlight didn’t penetrate far enough to reach the bottom. He tossed the sign to the side with a tremendous clatter of noise, alerting anyone for a quarter mile of their presence. She was letting him make his mistakes, ready to package them up like a fat parcel to place at El Patron’s feet. It was foolish of her. Kill him or not, but don’t let him compromise their mission. Why hadn’t she killed Wolfe when she had the chance? With every month that passed, he grew stronger. His place in the Guild grew more solid every day. With every day that passed with Wolfe’s head still on his shoulders, his eventual death slipped more from necessary casualty into murder she might be condoned for.
Just one good excuse, she thought. One little reason to leave you out here in the desert. Let the vultures carry your soul to heaven, if you still had one. One little mistake.
Wolfe had tied a rope to the edge of the timber, using a good solid knot. It was secured to his carabineer, which was secured to his climbing harness.
“Geronimo,” he said, dropping into the hole, and Kaltenbach had a hard time not slicing the rope right there. But she was too late, and the fall wouldn’t have killed him, so she hooked her own rope to her own carabineer, tying it to the truss.
“You coming, or what?” he called up from the darkness. “It’s only forty feet down.”
She stared into the darkness, checking and double checking her harness. Forty feet was a long way. It was likely spacious in there. Not like a coffin. Not like the plain wooden box and the dry prairie soil. Not like waking up panicked with only dark planed wood over her head and the faint memory of a man who kissed her with a mouth full of blood. Not like screaming under the earth in fear and panic with air growing staler by the breath. Not like clawing fruitlessly, hungrily at the wood in front of her face, fingernails bloody, throat hoarse with screams, too terrified to hear the sound of shovels and salvation as her sire unburied her from the family plot still bearing the late summer daisies left in a jar by the loved ones she would never see again.
She still couldn’t jump into the darkness. A hole in the earth. She would be buried alive. She would not come out.
She took a breath and exhaled. It was the shaft of a mine. Mines had shafts, and mines had drifts. The map said the drift led to Steel Fang’s property. There would be an egress, she promised the frightened newly dead girl of her memory. She could escape. Soundlessly she dropped into the hole, using the pulley to slow her passage. The darkness seemed to swallow her, but she stopped the screams in her throat. Those who have died do not fear death.
“What took you so long?” Wolfe asked, and by the sounds of his echoes, they were in a room at least twenty feet wide and a hundred feet long.
Kaltenbach crouched to feel the floor of the tunnel, thick with dust. She tasted it. Copper. This entire state had been built on copper, rich mines fueling towns the way water made desert flowers bloom, only to dry up and die again when the market fell and the seasons changed, waiting for the next monsoon or rise in metal prices. If Red Rock rose again, as El Patron believed it would, they would own this mine. They would own the rights to the land, and its people with their rich warm blood. Kill Steel Fang and take his castle, and they could rule in his stead. Her father would have approved.
Wolfe was shining a flashlight into the darkness. “Think it goes this way.”
“Sshh.” She stopped him. “Turn that off.”
“What?” He turned the beam towards her, which would have destroyed her night vision had she not shut her eyes closed against it with her arm over the lids. “Oh.”
He must have heard it as well. Somewhere in the distance, the stifled moans of someone crying. Feet shuffled in dust, and then the crying ended. With the echoes in the mine, it was too hard to tell where it was coming from, but she followed Wolfe down the passageway. He’d covered the beam with his fingers so that only a pale red glow seeped through the flesh of his hand. They followed it on a west by northwesterly path for fifty feet, and then it turned due west for another twenty. Wolfe stopped. He uncovered the flashlight, shining the too-bright light into the passageway beyond. Grey stone cut into a rough square tunnel, supported by braces led another fifty or sixty feet before creeping slowly upward. Old rusted rails led along the path, and ahead they saw the decrepit hulk of an ore cart.
Kaltenbach strode ahead, wondering what had stopped him, but she, too, stopped for no reason, unable to go any further.
“What the fuck?” He put his hand up to the invisible wall.
She couldn’t feel anything, but when she tried to cross, she couldn’t. Stepping across that line was like falling upwards out of a pool of water. She watched as Wolfe backed up, and with a running start, barreled himself at the wall. He tripped and fell, backwards, back into the shaft side of the drift.
“Some kind of force field,” he said. “But what’s powering it?”
Witchcraft, she thought. Magic. And then she thought of her former master’s Dayrunner, and the way she had slipped invisible, the necklace which one could not bite through, the stakes that burned the skin. It was time for El Patron to play his card, to call his owed favor.
“That’s pretty cool,” Wolfe said, touching the barrier. “I wonder how it works? Some kind of magnets?”
“Be silent,” she told him. “There is someone here in the darkness with us.”
Wolfe, mercifully, shut up for a full thirty seconds. Kaltenbach walked back towards the shaft, and then turned to another passageway she hadn’t seen on the way in. It had half collapsed, leaving a narrow passageway barely wide enough for her hips. She had to scramble through. (Walls were closing in. Walls were closing in. No. Those who had died do not fear death.) She pushed through.
She smelled them first, the stench of shit and fear and illness and humans who had no chance to bathe. She heard them next, the child crying and his mother frantically shushing him with the last panic of a woman who believes her death is at hand.
“Bring the light,” she ordered.
Wolfe came right after her, bringing the flashlight, which he shone on seven frightened and filthy faces. One man stood in front of the woman and child, protectively, as if he could keep Kaltenbach from killing them, though he had no weapon except a small lump of debris.
“You knew about this,” she said coldly.
“Sort of. Yeah, I guess so. I mean. He brought out people for us to eat, when I lived with him.”
“A blood herd,” she said.
“I guess he’s smuggling them in with the plane. I saw the airstrip. Pollos.”
“They are not chickens. They are human beings,” she said. Ordinary people, living their lives, trying to be noble, to care for family, to love and grow old and die and bear children. And these others came who saw them as nothing but animals, who put their lines on the map and said, “you do not belong here.”
“That’s just what they call them, the people smuggled in over the border. They’re just illegal immigrants.”
“They are coming with us.”
“El Patron won’t like it. We do anything, Steel Fang is going to know we were here.”
“They are coming with us. I will not leave them to die in the dark.” To be taken out to their death, one by one, the mother knowing she could not save her child, the father knowing he could not save his wife. They were people. The walls were closing in. The air was stale. Save them, the memory of her mother said.
“No,” Wolfe said.
“We are taking them back.”
“I said no, Kaltenbach.”
“Do you have a knife?” she asked.
“Yeah, I got a survival knife.”
“Draw it,” she ordered. She drew her own knife and held it easily in her hand. It wasn’t her weapon of choice, but she could kill with it.
Wolfe set the flashlight down on the ground and released the snap on his survival knife. He pulled it out hesitantly. “You think we should kill them?”
“If you kill me, you can do what you like. If you die, I leave your body for the vulture and coyotes, and I will save these people.”
“Are you fucking—” He broke off as she lunged for him.
He dodged just in time. She stabbed again, faster and stronger, and managed to pierce the flesh on his upper arm. He cried out and she stabbed forward, impaling the knife into the wood of one of the supports to hold him there. She lunged for his throat, teeth bared.
Wolfe held the knife in front of him, holding her off. She grabbed for his arm. In the darkness, she thought she heard faint muffled voices, asking for help, asking to be saved.
“Stop! Stop! We’ll get them out! Fuck! Stop! Okay! We’ll do it!”
She ripped the knife out of his arm. “Don’t betray me.”
“Jesus, Kaltenbach. You’re a stone-cold bitch. Fine, but you get to tell El Patron this was your idea.”
“I’ll tell him.”
Wolfe proved compliant enough after that. He sheathed his knife and helped her convince the rest of them to go back to the larger chamber under the grey rectangle of sky. Pity. It would have been so satisfying to leave the body of Steel Fang’s former minion in the cave to rot.
El Patron was not pleased to see that they hadn’t returned alone. He met them in the spare bedroom he used as an office. It was a small house, almost as small as the houseboat which served as the Guild House in Seabingen. Everything in it was beige or white and terribly ordinary, from the Formica and linoleum kitchen with its slightly-dated cabinets to the arcadia door which had been blocked with plywood as soon as they moved in. It was not the seat of power worthy of their Guild.
“I tried to stop her, Sire. She threatened to kill me. Look!” Wolfe held up his arm, which had stopped seeping blood and now had only a dull ooze.
Kaltenbach stared at the desk in front of El Patron. She should have just killed Wolfe. It would have been the one thing that night that had gone as it should. It was her fault that the mission was compromised. They deserved that house. They had paid for that house.
“Is this true?”
“Yes. I would not leave them there. He disagreed. I challenged a duel and he submitted.”
“You were supposed to just go and do reconnaissance,” El Patron said, steepling his fingers. “Your task was to find a way in. And now what’s going to happen when they come back and find their blood herd is gone?”
“Damn right, Sire. Steel Fang is going to be pissed off,” Wolfe sounded smug. “Good luck using the mine as a back door now.”
“We could not use it anyway,” Kaltenbach said. “It’s blocked.”
“And what the fuck are we going to do with a bunch of illegals?” Wolfe said. “It’s against the law to help them, you know. You can go to jail just for giving them water.”
Kaltenbach held her jaw firm and said nothing.
“They can bring the law down on us, and that’s the last thing we need. And now Steel Fang knows we’re after him. I don’t know what the fuck she was thinking, Sire.” Wolfe rolled his eyes. “She compromised the mission.”
“It’s true,” El Patron said. “It’s against the law to help these people. Wolfe, fetch my Dayrunner.”
Wolfe sighed loudly and left. Less than a minute later, he returned with Rivera. El Patron pulled out his wallet and handed him some money. “Rivera, the people out there. They can’t stay here. Take up a collection. They will need food and bus tickets to somewhere far away, or a running car if you can get something cheap. Please arrange it. Kaltenbach will help.”
“Yes, sir.” Rivera left.
El Patron kept his fingers steepled. “Wolfe, you are also dismissed.”
Wolfe sighed and rolled his eyes again as he left. El Patron didn’t look up or speak until he had closed the door behind him.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said, staring straight ahead.
“Are you now? Because there’s still time to go and kill them all and put their bodies back in the mine. Steel Fang might never know it wasn’t a methane leak.”
Kaltenbach jerked her head up, staring at him in horror.
“That’s what I thought. You’re not sorry.”
“I stand by my decision.”
“Wolfe is right, you know. It is illegal to help them. We could all be jailed for not calling INS right now. We can only hope they keep their mouths shut. Steel Fang is going to know that we’re scoping his place out, and we lost our best chance of ingress to the property. You knew this, and you did it anyway.”
“Yes.” She met his eyes, defiant now, of her mother’s people. The U.S. hadn’t respected the borders of her mother’s people, why should she respect its borders?
“I’m going to tell you a story. This was a long time ago, back when I was still human. Sit. This story will take a while.”
Kaltenbach pulled one of the metal folding chairs from where it leaned against the wall.
“I was travelling home from visiting a friend. It had been an ordinary visit, along a path I had traveled more than once. And I saw something that changed me. It was a man with bloody feet.
“I knew at once he was an escaped slave. Pennsylvania was a free state, but at that time there was no safe place for them. This man was sitting under a tree, with his legs straight out in front of him. Instead of shoes, he had bound his feet in rags. The rags were soaked in blood, and had grown black and crusted. Flies swarmed over them.” El Patron’s voice changed slightly and he stared off, as if struck by the memory. “I remember his feet. I’d never seen feet so torn up. And the haunted look he gave me, like I was the devil himself. When he saw me, he started to get to his feet to run again.”
“What did you do?” Kaltenbach asked quietly, afraid of the answer. He was of her father’s people, the slaughterers of villages, the poisoners of buffalo.
“I called out to him not to run. Then I took my shoes off. I took my shoes off and left them by the road. The socks were new. My mother had knitted them for me, and back then the wool for such things wasn’t cheap. They were new boots too, a Christmas present, meant to last a year if I slowed down growing. I had some sandwiches my friend’s mother had given me for the walk home. If I’d had a horse, I would have left it too. I met the man’s eyes as I left by belongings on the road, and kept going so as not to spook him, but he was already walking. I tried to forget it, but I couldn’t. His feet, torn to ribbons, and yet he kept walking, in free lands but still on the run from those who might bring him back.
“It was illegal to help slaves escape. I could have gotten my whole family in trouble. My mother was worried for me, thinking I’d been robbed. My father beat me for being so stupid, thinking I’d lost them in a hand of cards. What I’d done was nothing, just a pittance. I can’t remember what the shoes looked like, but to this day, when I close my eyes, I can still see those feet, still see the hurt in his eyes, to feel so much pain with every step but to keep running, knowing that you may not ever find peace. When I closed my eyes, I saw those feet and imagined wanting to escape so badly that you’d run on feet that bled through rags.
“Slavery had been an abstract idea, not real to me. I didn’t know anyone who could afford slaves. We had this idea that it was bad, kind of, but it wasn’t until I saw that man that it became real for me, what the south was desperate to protect. I’d like to think that any man who saw that and kept on walking wasn’t the kind of man whose hand I’d shake.
“When the time came, I volunteered,” El Patron said. “I understand, Kaltenbach. I respect your choice. You have to live with yourself. We are vampires, but we are not monsters.”
“Wolfe knew about the blood herd,” she said.
El Patron gave a weary sigh. “I wonder what else he knows that he hasn’t told us? You may get to kill him after all, Kaltenbach. But he’s right. This is a problem. They will probably block up the mine. They’re sure to increase patrols. And now we need to find another way in.”
“You can’t get in that way, sir. It’s blocked with some kind of a ward. You’re going to need a mage to figure out a way past it.”
“Wolfe said nothing about Steel Fang having a mage,” El Patron said. “I wonder who made the ward for them? Perhaps Medina knows. If she can give us a name, we’ll find out if their mage can be bought. And if not, well, it’s time for our former Guild Leader to give us that favor he promised.”
The people they rescued from the mine weren’t sleeping, even though it was the middle of the night. They must have gotten their days and nights mixed up, Kaltenbach thought. She ordered them into her SUV and they were compliant, though they seemed alarmed by the box of food and the jugs of water she put into the far back with the smallest two humans. Children, she realized. They were children. He had put children in a mine to die as someone else’s food.
She’d calculated where to take them. It was a curving, deserted road with only a low set of hills between it and where she lived. She stopped the car and the desert silence seemed total.
Kaltenbach reached into the glove compartment. The humans gasped collectively in alarm when she took out the gun, but she holstered it without looking at them, and collected the rest of the paperwork with her name on it, leaving the maps. She pulled the key out of the ignition and spiraled it off the ring, then stuck it back in the ignition. She took out the money she’d collected and handed it to the oldest woman, with a circling gesture indicating it was for everyone. At this they looked especially puzzled.
“Forget you saw me,” Kaltenbach ordered. “I’m going to have to report my car as stolen, so you have maybe two days in it, max.”
They still stared at her, baffled. Did any of them speak English? She regretted she didn’t know more Spanish, or whatever they spoke. She knew nothing about them. Why had she risked so much for these people? No good deed goes unpunished. Wasn’t that the saying?
Kaltenbach opened the car door and got out. She shut it again. No one had slid into the driver’s seat yet. Could any of them drive?
“Goodbye,” she said, and then one phrase in Spanish came to her mind. “Vaya con Dios.”
She loped off into the darkness, heading for the hills. It was only a few miles, and the night was warm. No good deed goes unpunished, the saying went. She needed that car. She’d counted on being able to drive it for another five or six years, at least. What if she didn’t get it back? What if they drove it across the border to Mexico? She wasn’t like Fain; her money had to be rationed and hoarded. And it was registered in her name, had her hair and her DNA in it. She was doing something illegal. It was illegal to help these people. It was a foolish risk. She had endangered them all.
She turned over her shoulder and watched as the car headlights came on, and then it headed down the highway. Kaltenbach released her shoulders. They had a chance. She had given them a chance. That was all anyone could hope for.
We are not monsters, he had said. Vampires, yes. Killers, yes. She would have happily killed Black Wolf. But we were not monsters. She was not a monster.
And in her bed, as the sun climbed over the horizon blocked safely behind plywood and light-proof curtains, Dorothy Kaltenbach slept the sleep of the just.