favor by slitting Bates’s throat. The fact might even make Cutter Dan feel generous enough, when he caught up with him—and however long it took, whatever it took, he would catch him—to follow the Judge’s invariant rule that captives had to be returned alive and relatively unharmed to stand trial so that they could be properly hanged. Rather than taking his own unhurried revenge on the coldheart. After all, a lot of things could happen out there in the Wild, beyond the reach of Santee’s hell-black eyes.
Not that Cutter Dan felt comfortable crossing the Judge. He didn’t have any evidence the old bastard had a doomie gift like second sight. Then again, he didn’t have any evidence to the contrary.
“At the same time,” Santee went on, “we cannot allow our grip to slacken on the home front—either in those areas we’ve restored to order or in Second Chance itself. Therefore, I will assign my Chief Marshal to take a picked squad, not to exceed twenty men, to pursue the fugitive Jak Lauren as well as his accomplices and bring them to justice. The rest of my sec men shall concentrate on their control and pacification efforts.”
He looked to Cutter Dan.
“How long will it take you to prepare for your mission, Chief Marshal?”
“Give me two hours.”
OUTSIDE, THEDAY was still cloudy but starting to heat.
Gonna be a muggy bastard, Cutter Dan thought. He took a long step to catch up with the three men who had just left their meeting with the Judge. They were talking among themselves in low, distracted tones.
“Gentlemen,” the chief marshal said, laying a hand on each man’s shoulder. Gein and Myers jumped.
“Just a friendly reminder for you. You might think of the Judge as just a crazy old coot. You have power here too. You’re men of consequence, and Mr. Toogood, here, is even the mayor. But make no mistake. Santee is the law in Second Chance.”
The two he’d grabbed hold of had turned their heads to look back at him. Myers’s face was pale behind his beard, and his eyes were wide in fear. Gein was scowling and looked as if he had been on the point of lighting into Cutter Dan for having the nerve to lay a hand on him. Until the sec boss’s little reminder let the air out of him.
“We understand, Chief Marshal,” Toogood said. He shot a hooded glance at his companion. “And we know it’s for the best. Believe me.”
Cutter Dan gave him a big old smile. “Sure thing, Mr. Toogood.”
His palm hovered by his violated face as he watched them split up and head for their respective homes. Along with the pain, the wound—and especially the stitches—were starting to itch like a bastard.
Cutter Dan dropped his hand to his side. He thought about the man who’d slashed him. He’d had a nasty scar down his face a lot like the one the sec boss was sure he was going to wind up with, though Cutter Dan hadn’t lost an eye, as the coldheart had. Funny how things went like that.
It was going to be even funnier how this would end. He was going to find the one-eyed man and slit his throat.
After Dan made him watch him do things to his friends, of course.
* * *
“GREAT,” MILDRED WYETHmuttered. “Just great.”
Slipping and sliding, she trudged miserably through rain and an endless hedge. Her lone consolation was that the thorns were so huge they were fairly easy to avoid and didn’t stick into her as fast and deep as slimmer ones would. It seemed as if her whole world was Krysty’s backpack ahead of her, and the gray-brown vines that seemed to writhe around her like diabolical tentacles with deceptive green leaves and silver spines.
And the endless drip of rain from a miserable bruise-colored sky.
They were somewhere northwest of Second Chance and not anywhere near far enough away. But they had to avoid the cleared areas around farms and such, especially the roads in and out, as if they were nuke hot spots full of deadly fallout. Those were the first places their pursuers would look for them. Instead, they were following what amounted to a game trail through the tangled, spiky, unnatural growth of the Wild.
“Any idea of where we’re going?” Ricky asked. He was the last one in line, right behind her.
“Like Ryan would tell me,” Mildred said. “But I’m guessing, away from Second Chance, mostly. Watch it, old man!”
The last was snarled at Doc, walking just ahead of her with Krysty. He had let go of a branch Ryan hadn’t hacked from their path, and it had whipped back and almost nailed Mildred in the face. As it was, it sprayed water droplets on her cheek, which didn’t do her any harm but still pissed her off.
“I am sorry,” he said contritely. “I shall try to be more careful. The monotony has distracted me, I fear.”
“Tell me about it,” Mildred said.
Ricky said something from behind her. She wasn’t listening close enough to make it out, so she answered with a grunt. He had begged Ryan to be allowed to take Jak’s place on point. Ryan had shot him down in short order, insisting on walking lead himself.
She liked Ricky well enough, she guessed. He was just a kid, who should have been home with his folks and his sister on Monster Island. Except, of course, that coldhearts had chilled his parents before his eyes, and sold his sister Yami into slavery; he was still looking for her, with an obsessive devotion that might have been comical had it not been so tragic and doomed. He was an engaging little doofus, in his way, the fumbling, eager, perpetually cheerful adolescent instead of the snarly or surly-sulky kind. And yet, when the chips were down, he was surprisingly competent and bone reliable. And there was not a scrap of malice in him.
Sometimes he was in love with Mildred, or at least her boobs. Sometimes infatuated with whatever halfway-presentable woman crossed their path. And he was always totally hung up on the walking thermonuclear warhead of femininity that was Krysty. Lucky for him, Ryan was secure enough in his lead-dog masculinity not to get bent out of shape about it—or just didn’t take a shy, awkward sixteen-year-old seriously as a romantic rival.
Krysty was Mildred’s friend, who accepted and did not judge her, and would never think of using her beauty as a weapon against the shorter, stouter, plainer woman—“darker” didn’t mean much in this here and now. Krysty never hesitated to use her looks against enemies—any more than any of them would hesitate to use any weapon that came to hand. She was as tough as leather and resilient as spring steel. But even though she could be as hard as need be to protect herself or a loved one, nothing ever touched her core of pure sweetness.
J.B. was Mildred’s partner; the two were lovers of long standing. She knew he was anything but cold and bloodless, although he often came across to outsiders that way. He could be ruthless, with a cold practicality that sometimes eclipsed Ryan’s. But she knew him as a good man.
Whatever that meant anymore. She felt he was good. Just as she felt that, down deep, they all were. It was enough.
It had to be.
Doc was a trickier case. The old coot exasperated her with his vagueness and his outmoded courtliness and sometimes otherworldly ideas. And yet she was uncomfortably aware—more than she had been in a long time—of the fact that his origin in time wasn’t much further removed from her day than Mildred’s was from the bizarre thrown-together family
