Mae swallowed down the taste of dust and fear and kept on singing.
The shutters each rattled again, then lay still. A moment passed in silence. Then a knocking stuttered across the chimney; the pounding of fists—too many fists—pummeled the back door. The man walked the perimeter of her house, pounding, prying, plucking. But her house, her song, held strong.
There was nothing she could drag to the broken door to close it, no way to stop him from stepping in, except her magic. If the magic didn’t hold, she would sacrifice a bullet and use the shotgun.
He strolled around the front of the house again, standing in her broken doorway. He smiled and bowed low, rolling his hat off between his long fingers with a grand flourish. He paused at the lowest point of the bow, and Mae heard something metal hit the wooden planks.
She glanced down. It was a brass button. And as the man stood again, he was missing a button from his coat.
“Begone,” she whispered in the pause of her song. But the man smiled and said a guttural word.
The brass button at his feet sprang open and flipped over. A hundred wriggling legs tucked beneath its armored body. The head was a drill with long mandibles and no eyes. It quickly tipped its snout to the wood plank at the man’s feet, and burrowed into it, sawdust and soil pushed up and out of the tunnel by its back legs as it headed toward her doorway.
“Easy as threading the eye of a needle,” the man hissed. “Spy the hole, pierce the hole, stab the weave.”
Mae swallowed, glanced down. She could not see the burrowing creature, but knew the man was right. If it could dig past her protections, if it could dig up inside the circle of magic that held her safe, it would break her barrier and the Strange man would be able to cross into her home, easy as thread pulled by a needle.
What could she do? Shooting him didn’t kill him. The shotgun was still humming, warming slower this time, the needle on the gauge not even at half charge. There were no spells that would make a man drop dead in his tracks. She could curse him, but if she stopped singing, the wooden devices would fall quiet and the web of protection around the house would end.
What did she have that could stop him? She glanced around the room, still singing, her mouth going dry, her heart pounding too hard, too fast. Herbs and wool and tinctures. Healing things, loving things, living things. Cooking pots, frying pans, her woven blankets stacked in a willow basket.
None of these things would do him harm.
Then she remembered the tatting shuttle in her pocket. It was a token of Jeb’s love to her, made of hawthorn, silver, and gold, given to her as a courting gift. She slid her fingers into her pocket and caught hold of the slim oval. It warmed at her touch, the edge of it sharp against her skin.
Sharp enough to draw blood. Heavy enough to be used as a weapon.
The drilling beetle dug and dug. She could see the scar it chewed into the threshold, a hump of wrinkled wood trailing its progress. Any second it would be drilling up and up, and then the man would have a hole small enough, large enough, to thread his way through and into her home.
No time to wait for the gun to charge. No time to reload the Colt. No time left at all. She threw the shuttle at the man. It flew as if it had wings. The shuttle slashed across the man’s cheek, drawing a deep red line through his flesh. Blood gushed from that wound, pouring black as liquid coal.
The man screamed, an unearthly screech, his spindled fingers fluttering up to his face, tapping and tapping. Black thread, thin as silk, appeared between the man’s restless fingers that wriggled as if he were weaving a net.
No, not a net. He was stitching the wound in his face.
He pulled his fingers away, the bloody thread spooling out from his finger that ended in a long, thin brass needle. He pulled the bloody threaded finger to his lips and bit the thread in two with serrated teeth.
Even stitched, the wound kept bleeding, black liquid pouring down into the scarf around his throat like ticks gone crawling.
Mae raised the shotgun, aimed. Charged or not, she was going to fire the thing. The shotgun whirred, and the wooden trinkets lining the wall picked up the hum. The man’s eyes narrowed.
Mae pulled the trigger.
This time, he did not step aside of the bullet.
This time, the shot struck flesh and gear and all else he was made of.
The man stumbled backward. Threaded fingers plucked at his coat, as if trying to pat out a burning flame. A globe of gold light surrounded him.
This time, the shot exploded.
And so did the man. Bits and pieces of him flew apart, scattering over the field.
Mae waited a moment, two, for the Strange to rebuild the bits of himself. There was no movement. Not even a shift of shadow.
Mae rushed over to the door, the gun still in one hand, and pulled her skinning knife. The brass bug had dug its way up through her threshold. It poked its head out of the hole, then wriggled free. She stabbed it with the knife. The bug writhed, tucked all its legs up, and popped off the edge of her blade, once again nothing more than a brass button, cold and still as a button should be.
Mae glanced out at where the man had been standing. Not a single scrap of him near her door, and nothing in the grass stirring.
The wind picked up again. One lone meadowlark sang a few unsteady notes. Another answered.
Dusk settled gently over the horizon, bringing the cool scent of rain and the voice of crickets.
Mae trembled. She had never faced anything as foul as that man. The shotgun was silent in her hand, the gears locked. With one last look out into the night, she picked up her tatting shuttle, which lay just outside the door, and made herself busy. Even shook, her feet wanted to run east, away from here, back to the soil that held her owing, back to the sisters who would wash her clean of the killing need for revenge.
Not yet. She couldn’t run yet.
She used the fire tongs to pluck up the button and drop it in a thick glass jar with a glass lid. Then she found the hammer and nails it would take to repair the hinges on her door, and hurried to do so. Before night closed in. Before the moon rose. Before other Strange creatures came calling for her blood.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Cedar could not move. His hands were bound behind him, numb. His legs were strapped to the chair, and his chest and neck were similarly cinched down tight.
Alun Madder plunked a chair down in front of Cedar and sat astraddle it, his thick arms crossed over the back of the chair.
“You are an interesting problem, Mr. Hunt.” He pursed his lips and sucked the blood off his teeth. He spit into an oily kerchief and wiped his mouth and beard.
“Been a while since the boys and I found a puzzle we couldn’t solve. We thought we had the way of you—a man running from his past and pain. That’s a common story for a common enough man. Then you go on and show you’re learned in old ways, Strange ways, and also foolhearted enough to lend a hand where you shouldn’t, putting your nose into business that’s none of your concern to save a boy who’s not your own. Seems you’re not that common a common man after all. Thing I wonder is how it took us so long to see the way of you.”
Cedar said nothing. They hadn’t gagged him, but he doubted there was much he could do to talk them into untying him.
If they held him until the full moon rose, he’d be happy to show them his uncommon way up close, and personalized. Then he’d tear their throats out.
Bryn brought another chair over and sat rightwise upon it. He had on a pair of goggles with a star spray of lenses fanned off his bad right eye, giving that cloud-shot eye a golden sheen. He’d taken off his coat and wore his sleeves caught in a band at the elbow, hands clean as a christening bowl. His vest seemed constructed entirely of pockets, and in those pockets were bits of chain, cotton, wicks, scissors, and blades.