The sun was not a disc but a furnace door left ajar, burning the world white and empty. Cain Hart rode through the bleached skull of the land, where the only things that grew were thorns and shadows too thin to offer shelter. The horse beneath him, a rawboned grulla mare, moved with a weary cadence that matched the rhythm of his own thoughts. Dust, the color of old bones, puffed with each step. It coated his duster, gritted in the stubble on his jaw, made a paste of the sweat on his neck. He didn't mind the silence. In silence, you could hear the lies the land told.
He saw them in the way the light bent over a particular mesquite bush—a shimmer like heat-haze, but cold, tinged the violet of a day-old bruise. Residue. The ghost-stench of something that didn't belong to the clean order of blood and soil. To anyone else, it was a trick of the eye. To Cain, it was a road sign painted in pain and hunger. He'd paid for the sight behind his eyes, paid in a currency that wasn't silver, and now he was forever picking through the ugly, sticky aftermath of things that clawed their way out of nightmares.
He'd been tracking the pack for two days. Ghouls. Not the storybook kind, not rotting sophisticates in ruined castles. These were prairie ghouls, born from bad deaths and buried secrets, from mass graves left by pox or pistols. They were coyote-clever and locust-hungry, digging with spade-like hands, eating anything soft enough to tear. They'd taken a traveler from the stage road, then a shepherd boy from a solitary flock. The boy's dog had lived long enough to lead a posse to the burrow. The posse had seen what was inside and ridden back to town, faces the color of chalk. They'd pooled money, not for a sheriff, but for a man with a darker reputation. They'd sent for Cain.
He found the burrow as the afternoon light began to bleed long. It was a crack in a low limestone bluff, cleverly hidden by a slide of scree. The residue here was thick, a pulsing, sickly smear across the rock face. It smelled of wet clay and spoiled meat, a smell that lived in the back of the throat. He dismounted, ground-tying the mare well back. Her ears were flat, her eyes showing white. She knew.
From a saddlebag, he took a rolled oilskin. Unrolled, it held his tools. Not a crucifix or vial of holy water. Those were for simpler things. He loaded the Schofield revolver with methodical care. The first two chambers held rounds cast from Missouri silver, etched with minute, interlocking circles—a binding sigil. The next two were cold iron, filed from a railroad spike, meant to break glamours and poison fae-blood. The last two were bone, pulverized from the sternum of a hanged witch and packed tight; they hurt things that were mostly spirit. He slid the gun into the cross-draw holster on his left hip. On his right, a twelve-inch knife of blackened steel, its guard a simple crescent moon.
He didn't pray. He listened.
A faint, dry scrabble from within the cave. A whisper of gravel. Then the wind shifted, and the smell billowed out, thick enough to taste.
They came not with a roar, but with a sighing rush, like sand pouring from a sack.
The first was low, dog-like, but hairless, its skin the grey of a corpse left in water. Its eyes were milk-white, blind but seeing. It moved on all fours, knuckles dragging, mouth a lipless gash of needle teeth. Cain didn't wait. The Schofield roared, the silver round taking it high in the shoulder. The impact wasn't just physical; the thing shrieked, a sound that was part pain, part radio static, and the violet residue around it boiled, evaporating in a foul puff. It collapsed, twitching.
Two more poured from the dark. He fired the iron round into the chest of the nearest. It punched through, and the thing howled, black blood sizzling as if on a hot skillet. The second lunged, a leap of surprising speed. Cain sidestepped, the black knife flashing down. It bit deep into the thing's neck, not clean, catching on gristle and spine. He wrenched it free as hot, reeking blood soaked his sleeve. The ghoul fell, clawing at the ground.
Silence, save for the gurgle of the dying and the thump of his own heart.
He waited, counting. The residue pulsed from the cave mouth. There was a mother. A den-queen. She'd be bigger, smarter, glutted on the choicest meats.
She emerged not with haste, but with a dreadful deliberation. She was the size of a starved bear, her back bowed, her arms long and ending in digging claws caked with earth and worse. Her face was a crude parody of a woman's, stretched over a skull too large, her mouth a wet pit. She sniffed the air, her blank eyes passing over him, then fixing on the dying pack-mates. A low, rumbling keen of grief vibrated from her.
Cain felt a twist in his gut, an unwelcome pity. Then she charged.
He fired the second iron round. It hit her broad chest, sizzled, but didn't stop her. She was a force of nature, of hunger and loss. He dropped the gun, letting the lanyard catch it, and gripped the knife in both hands as she was upon him.
The impact drove the air from his lungs. Claws ripped at his duster, tearing leather like paper. He smelled her breath—a charnel house, a deep grave. He drove the knife up under her ribcage, searching for a heart he wasn't sure existed. She screamed, a sound of pure rage, and her head darted forward, teeth snapping an inch from his face.
He head-butted her, his forehead crunching against the bridge of her nose. She recoiled, and he shoved, using her own momentum to topple her onto her side. In a fluid motion, he grabbed the fallen Schofield, thumbed back the hammer on a bone round, pressed the muzzle to her temple, and fired.
The report was muffled. Her body didn't just die; it unmade. The violent tension left her limbs, and the residue that clung to her like a second skin dissipated with a final, sighing hiss. The terrible, constructed life left her, and she was just a monstrous carcass in the dirt.
Cain stood, breathing hard. A line of fire burned across his ribs where claws had found flesh. He shrugged off the torn duster. The cuts were shallow, but they'd need cleaning. Ghoul filth was septic.
The work was not done.
He took a small leather pouch and a pair of heavy pliers from his kit. Kneeling by each of the smaller corpses, he opened their jaws. The teeth, those long, needle-like teeth, were worth money. Not to a dentist, but to certain apothecaries in St. Louis and San Francisco who ground them into powders for dubious medicines and darker charms. He worked methodically, the cracking and pulling sounds loud in the quiet canyon. He dropped each yellowed tooth into the pouch. The den-queen's canines were as long as his thumb. They went in last.
He surveyed the burrow. Inside, he knew, would be the relics of the dead—tatters of clothing, a pocket watch, the small bones the ghouls couldn't digest. He wouldn't go in. Let the next rain, or the next thing that claimed this hole, deal with it. His job was eradication, not archaeology.
Back at his mare, he poured water from his canteen over the claw wounds, the sting a clean, honest pain. He smeared them with a pungent salve from a tin—comfrey, witch hazel, and a pinch of blessed salt. He wrapped the worst of it with a strip of linen. Only then did he take a long pull from the canteen, the water warm and metallic.
He rode into the fading light, the pouch of teeth a slight, grim weight against his thigh. Two hours later, a single light gleamed in the purple distance: the town of Bitter Springs. It wasn't Perdition's Fall, not yet. This was just business.
The man who'd sent for him was the barkeep, a fat fellow with nervous eyes named O'Leary. Cain met him in the alley behind the saloon. He didn't go in. He didn't need whiskey, or questions, or the wide-eyed stares of men who'd heard the shots and seen him ride back alone.
"It's done," Cain said, his voice a dry rasp from dust and disuse.
O'Leary held a lantern up, its light jumping on Cain's torn shirt, the fresh bandages, the blood that wasn't his own smeared on his hands. "All of 'em?"
"The den is clear. The land will heal. In a year, you won't know it was there."
The barkeep didn't ask for proof. Cain's appearance was proof enough. He handed over a small cloth sack, heavy with coin. Cain loosened the drawstring, peered in. Mostly silver dollars, some gold half-eagles. Honest payment.
As he turned to go, O'Leary cleared his throat. "Fella was in here earlier. Askin' about you. Didn't look like the law."
Cain paused. "What did he look like?"
"Pale. Real polite. Dressed fine, but dusty. Said he had work down south, in a boomtown called Perdition's Fall. Said if a fella like you was interested, to present this at the Bella Union Saloon." O'Leary held out his hand. In his palm lay a single silver dollar. But it was wrong. It was tarnished not with age, but with something darker, a blackish-green patina that seemed to swallow the lantern light. Etched into its face, over Lady Liberty's brow, was a tiny, intricate symbol: a keyhole with no key.
Cain didn't touch it. He saw the residue on it, faint but complex, a shimmer of obligation and sealed power. It wasn't a summoning. It was an invitation to a specific kind of trouble.
"He say a name?"
"Valencourt. Monsieur Valencourt."
A name that tasted of old stone and older blood. Cain let a long, slow breath hiss out between his teeth. He'd heard the name, in whispers. Archivists. Historians of the long night. They didn't send for hunters without cause.
He took the tarnished dollar. It was cold, unnaturally so, and the metal felt somehow brittle, like ancient ice. He dropped it into the sack of payment coins, where it lay distinct and ominous.
"Thanks," he grunted, and walked into the dark towards his horse.
He rode out of Bitter Springs that night, not stopping to sleep. The moon was a bone sliver. The plains were a sea of ink. The coin in the bag seemed to hum against his leg, a low, persistent vibration felt in the roots of his teeth. Perdition's Fall. He knew the place. A silver strike town, then a railroad town, a magnet for hope and vice. And now, it seemed, for things that used silver dollars for calling cards.
As he rode, the vision behind his eyes flickered. Not with the fresh violet of ghoul-stench, but with deeper, older colors—the gold of greed, the red of fresh-spilled blood, and a spreading, aching void of gray, the color of something that had forgotten its own name. It was a tapestry of coming pain, woven into the very dust of the road south.
He touched the pouch of teeth at his belt, their sharp outlines pressing into his hip. One kind of currency for another. The world was a market, and he was just a trader in finalities. He nudged the grulla mare into a steady lope, the sound of her hooves the only drumroll for the war he was riding to meet.