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  “No!” Zee jerked me back by the shoulder so hard I nearly fell over.

  “Zee!” I hollered, twisting free of his grip. “She wants a drink of water; she’s no danger to us.”

  In anger or in fright, I squeezed Hester a little too tight. She screeched at me and dug her claws into my arm. It was only in the silence that followed that I noticed the barrier had stopped buzzing.

  “That voice,” said the stranger from the end of the alley. “I know that voice.”

  I turned to see that the girl, who I thought had fallen unconscious, had stood back up again. Suddenly she was like a different person: she stood taller, spoke in a stronger voice, and when she smiled, a mouthful of silver teeth flashed in the moonlight.

  My arm stung where Hester had scratched it, and my stomach went cold.

  “Is that ‘Zee,’ as in Zebediah?” she asked.

  Zee’s hand dropped to his side, limp and heavy, his knuckles brushing against my jeans. A single word puffed from his lips in a white cloud:

  “Rosa?”

  Feeling very small and very alone, I reached for his sleeve. “Zee?” I said to him, but my voice came out as a croak. If he heard me, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  The stranger began to speak in the rolled r’s and clear vowels of the Castalan language. Zee had been teaching me for months, so I understood pretty well:

  “Zebediah? Mother of God, it is you! You’re alive!”

  Zee’s jaw trembled, but all he was able to say was the same word as before: “Rosa.”

  The barrier sizzled to life as she put both hands up against it. Its purple light reflected in her crazed eyes, and a lock of tangled hair hung down in front of her smudged, dirty face.

  “You survived,” she laughed – a deep, slow sound, like boiling molasses. “You survived, and you found an Hacenieves. A SnowMaker! All those years of struggling, and now – ha! We’ll never go thirsty again! Brilliant, Zebediah. Brilliant. Now come, let me in.”

  I looked from the stranger up at Zee, and apparently my mouth was hanging open, because snow fell on my tongue. “Zee, what is this person talking about? Who is she? Who,” I swallowed. “Who is Zebediah?”

  “Zebediah!” demanded the stranger. “What are you waiting for?” Her eyes flicked between Zee and me, and her smile lines began to fade. “Zebediah?”

  Zee’s throat worked, and without looking away from the stranger outside the barrier, he cast out a hand, groping for mine.

  “Come on,” he croaked. And then again, pulling me back down the alley, he said, “Come on!”

  I ran with him, not knowing quite why. Whoever this Rosa was, she couldn’t get to us unless somebody lowered the barrier.

  As we reached the end of the alley, stumbling through the snow, I cast one last look back. There stood the mysterious Rosa, aglow in the crackling, purple light of the barrier. But around her shoulders, her poncho bubbled and writhed as something underneath it struggled to get out. It poked up through the hole at her neck – the scaly, sinuous head of a snake that she carried around her shoulders.

  And just like that, it clicked – a snake. Rosa. The fear written all over Zee’s face. That woman – the woman I had almost let freely into Seward City – was Rattlesnake Rose, one of the deadliest, most wanted outlaws in all the West.

  The shiver that went through me at that realization would have knocked me over if I hadn’t had Zee to lean on. But it was like that, pressed up against him, running across the square, that I got my second shock of the night.

  “She called you Zebediah,” I panted.

  He flicked a quick glance down at me, but looked back up without answering.

  I knew, though. If that woman was Rattlesnake Rose, then that could only mean that Zee – the man I had fallen in love with – was really Zebediah the Reckoner, her partner in crime.

  Chapter 2

  “Zee!” I shouted, trying to keep up. With each step my boots sank deeper into the snow, and I lurched and stumbled my way across the square. The bell on Hester’s collar jingled like mad, and the old cat dug her claws into my shirt, not in anger, I thought, but just to hold on. “Zee!” I cried again, but when he didn’t answer for the second time, I decided to try something different:

  “Zebediah!”

  It worked. He stopped dead, turned on me, and roared, “Don’t call me that!” Then, quieter, “Please, Cazo.”

  “It’s true, then,” I said, staggering to his side. “It’s really true. That was Rattlesnake Rose, and…and you’re Zebediah the Reckoner.” All the newspaper headlines I’d ever read about the pair flashed before my eyes, and the grainy photographs that accompanied them – the shot-up store fronts, the wrecked saloons, the women weeping into handkerchiefs.

  The bodies.

  “Y-you,” I stammered, “you rob coaches and…and have gun fights with sheriffs. My God, there was that entire town—”

  My head snapped back as Zee grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “That was never supposed to happen that way!” he shouted. An animal fury burned in his eyes, and for a moment, I could believe that all of it was true – that the man looming over me was a cold-blooded killer. But he closed his eyes, choked down his anger, and when he opened them again, it was like he was a different man – the man I had known him to be. When he spoke next, his voice was soft and shaky with tears. “What happened at Centersville was an accident. You have to believe that.”

  The snow fell between us, and from the wide field ahead the lowing of the cattle echoed back.

  His hands still on my shoulders, Zee licked his lips and started to whistle. It was a weak and broken sound – the sound a child made to keep away the monsters in the dark. Not the sort of sound you’d expect to come from the lips of a wanted murderer.

  Standing there so close, I caught a whiff of him – the powerful scent of leather and horses. I had smelled it the first time he’d ever held me; it made me think of the small room we shared beside the stables. Whatever else he was, he was still the man that I loved. There had to be some way that this all made sense. I just didn’t have the full picture.

  “I believe you,” I said.

  He sighed. “Thank God. I promise I will explain everything, but first we need to let the Sewards know. We have to put everyone on alert. If Rosa should ever get inside…”

  As we left the square and stepped into the wide, windy pastureland, I could feel the tension in him. And when we came to the herd and had to wend our way between them, still whistling to keep them calm, Zee barely even slowed. He shoved one aside to make room, eliciting an offended moo. I couldn’t understand his terror. Rattlesnake Rose might be close, but she was still safely outside the barrier; I had Hester in my arms, and now that I knew better, I wasn’t going to let her lower that barrier for anything. The only other person who could issue the old Prime a command was her master, Mr. Seward, and even then, he had to have her within eyesight to do it.

  We were safe, but Zee kept on running.

  Finally we pushed through the last of the cattle and emerged into the golden glow of the Big House. Zee stopped his whistling in the middle of the melody, and our boots clunked up the porch steps, shedding snow. At the top, he threw open the door so hard it banged off the wall, not even stopping to wipe his feet on the mat. He barreled through the entrance way toward the kitchen, dripping snow behind him.

  “Que ruido hacen!” Marta the housekeeper turned an offended glance at us over her shoulder as we stormed into the kitchen. She stood at the sink washing the dishes she had used to cook dinner, one bushy gray eyebrow raised in indignation. Once she saw Zee and the look on his face, though, she let the pan she was holding plunk into the water. From the adjoining dining room, voices buzzed, but in the kitchen, an anxious silence fell.

  “What’s happened” Marta whispered in Castalan, turning to us and wiping her sudsy hands on her apron.

  Zee didn’t stop to tell her. He just touched her on the shoulder as he slid past and warned her not to go outsid
e tonight. Gawping, she turned to me for answers, but all I could think to say was, “Está bien” – Everything is fine – before I hurried into the dining room after Zee.

  I was too late. Just as I stepped over the threshold, there came a heavy thud, and something shattered. The chatter I had heard from the kitchen morphed into exclamations of shock and horror. Silverware clattered and chairs scraped back over the carpet. But I couldn’t see what had happened. Zee’s wide shoulders, still heaving from the race here, blocked my view. When I finally stepped around him, I let out a cry of my own.

  Mr. Gomery lay squirming on the floor at Zee’s feet, a broken champagne flute at his side. His cane and his silk hat had rolled away from him, and the front of his white dress shirt was soaked in blood.

  “Gomery!” cried Ms. Vambray from behind a gloved hand. She stood at the table across from us, practically buried in the huge, puffy dress she wore, her chair toppled behind her.

  Mr. Seward, standing next to her, held his composure a little bit better, but only a little. His mouth hung open, and a piece of stringy beef dangled from his moustache. “What in God’s name…?”

  My mind flashed back to the bloody photographs from the newspapers – to the tales of Zebediah the Reckoner. “Zee,” I choked out, tugging on his sleeve. “What—?” But when he turned to face me, he looked just as confused as everyone else.

  “I…I just opened the door,” he stammered. “He was standing there. It hit him, he…he fell, and…”

  “It’s all right,” came a voice from the floor. “I’m all right, for heaven’s sake. I only wish I could say the same for my shirt. And right in the middle of my toast, too. Mr. Briggs, fetch me my cane, would you?”

  I stood there, frozen. Mr. Gomery wasn’t dead. He didn’t even seem to be hurt. But then what had happened? Where had all of the blood—?

  “Mr. Briggs,” he said from the floor. “If you please? This is rather humiliating.”

  Numb, I walked across the room and picked up Mr. Gomery’s cane without hardly realizing what I was doing. He pulled on me hard as I helped him to his feet, and Hester, who once again found herself jostled, mewed her displeasure. But as Mr. Gomery leaned into me, I got a sniff of his cologne, and all of the sudden I realized how close I was to him – that I was touching him – and my stomach flipped over.

  Mr. Gomery looked every bit the well-bred patrician, with his delicate, almost womanly features and slight but sculpted frame. The carefully groomed state he usually kept himself in was somewhat undercut by all of the blood, but even so he was desperately handsome.

  Unfortunately, his looks were about the only attractive thing about him.

  “Oh!” he whined, pulling his shirt tails out of his pants to survey the damage. “Look at this mess! This was Italic silk! This is never going to come out!”

  Silverware chimed as Mr. Seward banged his hand down on the table. “Gomery! Damn it, explain yourself. What’s going on?”

  “It’s stage blood,” said Mr. Gomery, rubbing his wetted thumb into the stains and sounding quite annoyed about the whole thing. “I was rehearsing the death scene from The Spider’s Kiss earlier, and I forgot to take the pouches out. They must have burst when Mr. Calhoun knocked me down.”

  “Stage blood?!” Ms. Vambray balled her hands into fists and stomped her foot. “Honestly, Gomery, you are the biggest buffoon—”

  “It is essential to the illusion!” said Mr. Gomery. “Aurelitus can’t very well be stabbed to death without losing copious amounts of blood. The audience would revolt!”

  “You don’t have an audience, you—”

  “Enough!” A powerful wind rattled the window behind Mr. Seward, and a flurry of snow blew across the dark sky outside. In my arms, Hester’s ears perked up, and her body went rigid. Mr. Seward stepped back from his place at the table and in quick steps strode around it to Zee’s side. “Enough of all of this nonsense. What is it, Mr. Calhoun?” he said in low tones. “I assume you’ve come storming into my dining room for good reason.”

  Zee’s hand shot out, and he grabbed the older man above the elbow hard enough to make him cringe. “At the barrier, Sir,” Zee panted. “A dangerous outlaw. Rattlesnake Rose.”

  “An outlaw, you say?” said Mr. Seward. “And?”

  Zee blinked, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “And?”

  Mr. Seward shook himself free of Zee’s grip and straightened his jacket. “Mr. Calhoun, the presence of outlaws and bandits in a lawless country like this is to be expected. That’s one of the reasons I brought Hester along. With her barrier up around the city, we are protected from the outside.”

  “And honestly,” said Mr. Gomery with a contemptuous chuckle. He had taken a seat in a nearby chair. “With a name like ‘Rattlesnake Rose’ she sounds more like a children’s entertainer than a criminal.”

  “Really,” Ms. Vambray rolled her eyes. She had also picked up her chair and sat down in it. “I’ll never understand what these people think is menacing about alliteration. I mean, what do you suppose her partner-in-crime is called? Victor the Vengeful Vole?”

  “Or maybe Tim the Terrible?” answered Mr. Gomery across the table.

  “Tim the Tarantula!”

  “Oh, yes, I quite like that!”

  The two of them laughed, but I shivered. The name of the Rattlesnake’s partner was Zebediah the Reckoner, and he was standing right there in the dining room with us.

  “Listen,” Mr. Seward said, paying no attention to the others. “I appreciate you letting me know of this threat, Mr. Calhoun, but I assure you that we are safe here behind Hester’s barrier. Bring her to me, please, Mr. Briggs.”

  I did, and Mr. Seward took her into his arms and stroked her back.

  “For the next few days, we shall simply be especially careful. No one shall lower the barrier for any reason. Sooner or later this Rattlesnake person will either go away or die of something unpleasant like exposure.”

  Zee shook his head, and a sad smile curled his lip. “With all due respect, Sir, the Rattlesnake is not just any—”

  But here at last, Mr. Seward had enough. “Respect? How dare you? If you were concerned with respecting me, Mr. Calhoun, you would take that foolish smile off your face. I appreciate your expertise, but I am not some novice to be laughed at! You think I don’t know what you think of me? An eastern dude with more money than he has brains – soft – weak. Well, I may not have been raised in the wilds, but I have known my share of struggle. My family came from nothing. Now two of my sons are serving in the Congress, and my daughter is studying medicine at Buxton Hall. You see, I know how to fight to get what I want, and what’s more, I know how to win. Mark my words: Seward City will thrive; Gomery will be mayor; and someday, when the Platte Territory is elected to statehood, he will be one of its senators! That’s what I do, Mr. Calhoun. I make things happen – impossible things. Just look around you,” he opened his arms wide. “I made it snow in the desert. If Mother Nature can’t stop me, then what makes you think that some common criminal can?”

  By the time Mr. Seward was finished, Zee was looking down at his boots. The snow in the window behind Mr. Seward swirled as if it mirrored the man’s anger, and I realized that it just might. He did control the SnowMaker, after all. But the snow steadied, and Mr. Seward took a deep breath and rested a hand on Zee’s shoulder.

  “You do good work here, Mr. Calhoun, but it would behoove you to remember just who it is you are working for. In the future, you needn’t interrupt a family dinner over something trifling like this. You’ve ruined a perfectly good and very expensive rug.” He motioned down at Zee’s boots and the soaked square of fabric underneath them. From the corner, Mr. Gomery whimpered.

  “Now then. Mr. Briggs, Mr. Calhoun, I recommend you collect your dinners from Marta and retire for the night. Tomorrow we begin final preparations for Gomery and Ms. Vambray’s wedding, and there is still a great deal of work to be done. Oh, and before you leave, send Marta in. If anyone knows
how to get blood stains out of Italic silk, it is she.”

  “Excellent thinking, Father!” said Mr. Gomery.

  The master of Seward City nodded his head. “Good evening, gentlemen.”

  ***

  When I was younger, back in East Carolina, I used to fantasize about being with men. In these fantasies, when they put their hands on the back of my neck or held me close, their touch was always warm and inviting. One of the things that surprised me the first time I was with Zee was that his hands were cold.

  Even after all these months, the chill of his touch still surprised me – but in some ways, it was even better than my warm-handed dreams. His cold hands were a reminder that I didn’t have to fantasize anymore. Zee was real, and he wanted to be with me.

  Back East it had never seemed possible.

  The night that Rattlesnake Rose first appeared, after we got back to our room, no sooner had the door latched shut behind me than Zee took my face in his cold hands and started kissing me. Not the soft, sweet kisses like usual. These were hard and hungry, as if he could feel all of the questions welling up inside me and was determined to stopper them with his lips.

  “Zee, stop,” I said, wriggling out from underneath him.

  He pulled back and stared at me, as if he couldn’t believe what he had just heard. I had never refused him before – had never wanted to. He scoffed and stomped off, making the loose floorboards in one corner of our room bang together. As if from another world, another lifetime, a little voice at the back of my head reminded me that I needed to fix that, that I’d been putting it off for too long.

  After tearing off his shirt and boots, he lay down on the bed and flung the covers over himself, rolling away from me to face the wall. I joined him, touched his shoulder, but he pretended to be asleep.

  I knew he was pretending. Nobody fell asleep that fast, and he wasn’t a good actor anyway. My suspicions were confirmed when the front paws and big, pointed ears of his Prime, a desert fox cub named Finn, appeared over the side of the bed. Her tail wagged, and she keened for her master’s attention.