A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose #2)(66)

There was a half-dried puddle of blood in front of it. I thought instantly of the dead man on the couch downstairs. Who could have killed him? Holden put the trunk up in the attic before Harriet had gotten to him with her knife, which had been yesterday. This blood was fairly fresh, and the man on the sofa hadn’t been lingering long. That kind of wound, you don’t last more than a couple of hours.

Holden had not killed the man on the sofa. I tried hard to figure it out. But my brain was a tangle.

I knelt to deal with the lock on the trunk. But the lid opened with my first pull. I was looking down at a mess of cloth. Maybe once it had been fine stuff, and I could tell it had been blue. Now it was rotted. There were wads of it on either side, and what looked to be a single fold in the middle. I lifted it as careful as I could.

And there was Moses the Black.

Over the bones lay what had once been a short sword. There was blood on it. I caught my breath in a gasp.

The bones were ancient, but I could tell they’d been those of a big man.

Jammed in beside the bones was some kind of paper. It might once have been a Bible. Or almost anything. I reached in and touched a leg bone with one fingertip. This man had been a real person before he’d been a saint. He’d been a killer, like me.

I felt very strange. I made myself stand up. I had to push off a vanity table with a broken drawer. I propped myself against it. Something else was in the attic with me, and it was not happy.

“I don’t want to steal your remains. I want to take them to the people in town who need you to lead them.” I was talking to a chest full of ancient bones, but it didn’t feel strange.

Next thing I knew, the bones and sword were gone and a man was standing between me and the trunk. He was big and very dark. I didn’t know when I’d sunk to my knees, but I had a terrible hard time not bowing my head.

“Who are you?” he said.

If thunder could talk, its voice would be like his. Though this man—this saint—had died in Africa, I guess one language is universal. The language of death.

“Moses,” I said, struggling because my lips were numb. “I’m one of the guards who brought your chest to Dixie, as a…” I struggled with how to say it. “As an inspiration for the black people here. They’re treated a lot like slaves.”

I forced my chin up. I looked into his terrible face. Something inside me relaxed. He was a fighter. I was a fighter.

Moses had long black hair mixed with gray, and a full beard. I didn’t know if he’d straightened it somehow, or if his hair was naturally less curly than I was used to seeing on black people. Though a robe or tunic covered his chest and his legs to the knees, on visible skin he had scars from here to glory. Sword and knife wounds, looked like.

“Your bones were stolen from my crew,” I said. “I was the only one able to look for you.”

“Talking a lot,” Moses the Black said.

I looked up at him sharply. I thought something you should never think about a saint. “I figured you might want to know why you were so far from Africa,” I said in a real pointed way.

“There is no home for me anymore,” he said, in a way I decided was a bit more civil. And a little sad.

“Your home is everywhere,” I said. “You’re a saint.”

It was like a bass drum laughed. Boom, boom, boom, low and slow. “I am? Whose misguided choice was that?”

“The Russian church,” I said.

He looked at me blankly.

“That came after you died.” It didn’t seem polite to mention his death, but I figured he was used to it.

“I stayed,” Moses the Black said, as if he’d just remembered. “I stayed when the marauders were coming. Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what marauders were.

“Now you’re here, I wish you’d help,” I told him.

“Petulant child,” Moses said.

I bit the inside of my lip. I wasn’t a damn dictionary. “Desperate woman is more like it. There is chaos in town.”

“Is this your town?”

“No. I live in Texoma. We’re in Dixie, the town is Sally. We got here on a train.”

“You guarded my remains?”

“Yes. But the train wrecked, and I got shot, and my boss got his throat cut, and Charlie died. Maddy still ain’t—isn’t—good to walk, and Rogelio was a traitor. My friend the grigori showed up—he’s on your side—and now I don’t know where he is.”

“I understood almost none of that.”

“Can you come talk to two of your people on the front porch, and then we can go into town to help ’em out? I’ll give you a ride if you need.” Maybe he could fly. “I’m gonna run and look for Eli.”

“There are Ethiopians on the front porch?” Moses the Black rumbled. He now looked as solid as I did.

“Yes,” I said. “Descendants of slaves.”

The big man followed me down the stairs and out the front door. I could hear his footsteps. I could not hear him breathing. He was barefoot, but he carried the sword in his right hand. It wasn’t real long or real skinny.

Pretty much the size of blade that had caused the wounds of the unknown man on the sofa.

I could not imagine the bones forming together and making the man, scraps of iron creating the sword—surely a monk had not been buried with a sword?—in time to kill the human man standing over it. That was outside my world.