“And when she turned to me, to the child I held in my arms, I saw what she meant to do. I shot her. I killed my child, one I loved with all my heart, to save her child.

“So don’t speak to me of witchcraft and magicks.”

“I’m sorry for your daughter, for all you lost, and for the terrible choice you had to make.”

“You know nothing of it.”

“You’re wrong,” Lana said quietly. “I’ve seen the madness. I faced it. I understand loss. I suffered it. I’ve known evil, with power and without. All of us who survived had to make terrible choices. The boy your granddaughter loves made a choice, like yours. To try to save the child you saved, he made a choice. It was Raiders, Mrs. Aldi, not magickals who attacked them. Just men, cruel men. Johnny could have gotten away, he could have left her and with his elfin abilities, run or hidden. Instead he fought to save her, and nearly died in the attempt. Would have died, as she would have if my daughter hadn’t come to their aid.”

Mrs. Aldi looked away, but those tightly pressed lips trembled. “He took her away.”

“It seems nearly the other way around, according to Lucy. Johnny wanted to fight against the Dark Uncanny, against the dark that threatens us all. Lucy begged him not to leave her. They left the home they know because you forbade them to love.”

“No good can come of mixing.”

“Oh, I so disagree. My husband isn’t magickal, our oldest son isn’t. We’re a family, Mrs. Aldi, one I love, one I’m proud of. We’re in this world together, and if you push back, push away from that world, your own becomes smaller and smaller. Has the community across the river offered yours any violence?”

“We leave each other alone.”

“Except when you hid a frightened boy, or when they offer healing balms or other aids to people here. You should ask your neighbors,” Lana said when Mrs. Aldi blinked in shock. “Ask yourself if your pride and your bias—and it is bias—is more worth clinging to than the child you saved at such a terrible cost. A child who loves and misses you. She asked me to give you this.”

Lana rose, laid a letter on the table by the chair.

“Thank you for seeing me,” she said, and left the woman with a choice to make.

* * *

Fallon spent ten days in the West. Despite the purpose, she found time for amusement watching Meda flick Travis away like an overeager puppy. She enjoyed watching Taibhse glide through western skies, over land that offered mile after mile of open. They often slept in that open, under stars so brilliant it made her throat ache, drifted off to the music of coyote and wolf.

She found the potential for a base in Sedona, a place she hoped to revisit, with the staggering beauty of the red mountains, the magicks that whispered in the air.

In the canyons, by boiling rivers, Faol Ban raced and hunted. Near crystal lakes that reflected the spearing mountains, hawks cried and circled overhead, deer roamed thick through forests, leaped through high grass with white tails bobbing. Elk bugled at dawn and swarmed like an army over grasslands with no fences left to block their path.

Bear larger than she’d ever seen fished in streams while cougar and lynx hunted over rocky slopes.

She watched the majestic flight of an eagle, the stunning dive of a peregrine, and understood the wonder Duncan had felt during his time in the West.

In settlements and camps, she spoke to leaders, conversed when it suited in Arapaho, in Sioux, and once, to an old woman’s delight, in Dutch.

They roamed through ruined cities, empty towns where ghosts roamed as thick as the deer and elk. It amazed her how many useful supplies had been abandoned, like the cars and trucks, the ranch houses, the cabins, even the weapons inside them.

Wild horses ran the plains in living rivers of speed and grace. Buffalo, hides thick with winter, cropped the swaying grasses.

“Generations ago, this land was taken from my people.” Meda scanned the land, the mountains, from the saddle. “We’ll have it back. It won’t be taken from us again.”

“Do you think that’s what I want? To take?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t fight beside you. But like the North Queen wants what she sees as hers, me and mine want what is ours. There won’t be reservations. We won’t be driven off again. This is home.”

“And for those, not of your tribe, who see this and believe it is or could be home?”

“There’s room.” Meda shrugged. “There’s room for those who respect our sacred places, who work the land with respect, or leave it as they find it. I’ve already given you my allegiance. This isn’t bargaining. It’s truth.”

“I’ve already given you my allegiance,” Fallon returned. “This isn’t bargaining, but another truth. The land here, or in the east, over the oceans, the oceans themselves, isn’t mine to give. But it will be held in the light by your people, and all people.”

“I pray for the day we see that truth. But we have a war to win first.”

As she rode on, Travis let out a long sigh. “She just gets hotter.”

Fallon rolled her eyes, and nudged Laoch into a trot.

Later, as the sun dipped, sent its first roses to bloom over the peaks in the west, she spotted a settlement tucked into the basin near the foothills of what her map told her was the Sierra Nevada.

“Should be good farming land,” Travis commented. “Good pasture.”

“Whatever’s left of Reno’s to the northwest. And Lake Tahoe. It could be a good spot for a base.” Fallon scanned the houses, the farmland—probably ranch land out here, she corrected. “Let’s see if we can convince them to join up, maybe we can spend the night here before we head north.”

“I don’t see much security.” Meda continued on in an easy walk.

“We’re still, what, a mile away?” Scanning, Fallon looked for any sign they’d be met with hostility. “They’ve got cook fires going. I can smell them. Meat cooking. No electric power. I can see solar on a few roofs, and somebody built a couple windmills. We’ll ride in slow, so they have time to look us over.”

And the crows came.

With their first shriek, an alarm sounded with the manic clanging of bells. Even as Laoch leaped into a gallop, riders on horseback poured out of the trees, headed for the settlement. The air rang with gunfire, tore with screams. Fallon saw a flash of fire streak from one of the houses, take out a rider.

On the gallop, Meda nocked an arrow, took out another.

“Travis! Grab that kid, three o’clock.”

He looked where his sister indicated, said, “Oh hell,” and veered off toward the little girl who stood frozen with her hands over her ears.

Fallon drew her sword and rode into battle.

At least thirty, she thought, most armed with handguns or rifles, a few with axes or swords. They shot wildly, indiscriminately, and even without Travis’s empathic ability, she sensed a kind of desperation.

She blocked bullets, slashed with sword. If she enflamed the guns, she’d disarm the defenders as well. Even as she considered it, Faol Ban leaped on a rider, tore him off his mount. She caught the symbol of a PW tattooed on his arm.

On another slap of magick, a fireball whizzed by. She felt the heat from it—entirely too close. She wheeled Laoch, shot her own fire at another PW. When he fell to the ground, a woman rushed outside, began to pummel him with her fists.

As she charged a swordsman, Fallon had to throw up her shield to block an arrow. She glanced up to the boy perched on a roof with a bow.

“Goddamn it, watch it! We’re the good guys.”

It took less than ten brutal minutes. At the end of it, bodies littered the ground, blood soaked into it. She looked up at the crows, circling under an endless sky painted with reds, golds, pinks, and a magnificent beauty.

“You’re done here.” She thrust her sword up, and added their bodies to the rest. “It’s done,” she called out. “They’re down. Travis?”

“A-okay. They’re not all dead,” he added.

“Good. I want to know where they came from. Meda.” She turned. “You’re hit.”

“A graze.” With as much disgust as discomfort, Meda looked down at the sleeve of her jacket, torn by the bullet, stained with the blood from the wound. “I bartered my ass off for this jacket.”

“I’ll fix it, and you. It’s done,” Fallon called again. “We’re here to help. I’m Fallon Swift, with my brother Travis, and Meda of the First Tribe.”

A man stepped out on the porch of a house. Maybe thirty, she thought, with a scruffy beard, a mop of brown hair under a cowboy style hat.

“Yancy Logan. Thanks for the assist.”

“Glad we were in the neighborhood. Are you in charge?”

He took off his hat, dragged his fingers through the mop before he set it back in place. “I might be, seeing as they killed Sam Tripper, who more or less was.”

A woman stepped out behind him with a wailing baby on her hip. Fallon felt a quiet power from both of them. “You’re welcome here. Yancy, she’s The One.”

“Okay, honey.” He blew out a long breath. “I guess we should start cleaning up this mess out here.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

They burned twenty-two PW bodies and three from the settlement they called Bright Valley. Fallon worked with a healer on wounded, both friend and foe.

She tended last to the knuckles of the woman who’d run out to use her fists on a downed PW.

“I don’t think we’d have held them off if you hadn’t shown up, so thanks. I’m Ann.”

“Ann. You’re welcome.” She glanced over as Yancy’s wife—Faith, half-Apache on her mother’s side, Fallon remembered—brought her a mug of tea. “Thanks. I gave some balm to Wanda, your healer. You should use some a couple times a day for a day or two.”

“They feel fine now.”

“The balm will keep it that way. I noticed you’re mostly women and children.”