Revenge and the Wild(16)

But the thought of disappointing Nigel made her hesitate. She’d given him her word, and that was supposed to mean something. With her elbow on the table, she put her head in her flesh hand and tried talking herself into leaving, thinking about all the horrible—and downright stupid—things she’d done while drinking. Like how she’d earned the nickname Wrong Way Westie, because after a few drinks she couldn’t find her way home.

Only the memories of her drinking days weren’t all bad: the burn, the courage, and eventually feeling nothing at all. She wanted to feel nothing again. History told her that particular feeling was addictive, that she’d need to drink more and more each time to sustain it. Stepping off that wagon was easy, but getting back on was nearly impossible.

She stared into her glass, eyes burning. She’d love nothing more than to throw the tumbler across the room, but the idea of taking her pain home with her, sitting with it the rest of the evening, was too much.

Putting her lips to the glass, she tossed her head back, the whiskey warming her all over like a hug. She winced, shook her head, and stuck her tongue out.

Several hours, and tumblers, later Westie blinked. Hazy light flashed before her as if she were watching the landscape through the spokes of a moving wagon wheel. Two gamblers sat at the table with her. Both were leprechauns. The T scars on their wrists were thievery brandings, letting honest folk know they were fugitives.

Another gambler put his coins on the table to join the game. Westie looked up, spit whiskey all over her cards, and nearly fell off her seat when she saw James.

“Are you all right?” he asked as she coughed.

“I’m fine,” she said in a strangled voice, throat feeling like she’d swallowed a wasps’ nest.

He sat beside her with a drink in hand. He had an educated thirst, sipping bourbon from the top shelf. She snuck glances at him as he smiled at the dealer and placed his bet. He didn’t look like a monster—he didn’t look anything like the Fairfields at all. With full lips, a straight nose, and a spattering of light freckles across his cheeks, he was downright handsome. She couldn’t imagine him being a killer like his family.

Westie tried to put the Fairfields out of her head. She’d come to the saloon to forget about them, after all.

“I thought you didn’t drink,” James said to her.

She picked the cards in front of her up off the table and fanned them in her mechanical hand. “I do now.”

Westie tossed her coins onto the pile in the middle of the table.

One of the leprechauns, an old buzzard with jaundiced eyes, watched her. He ran a filthy hand through his yellow beard, his face more hair than flesh with the exception of a knobby potato of a nose and plump red lips.

“What?” Westie said, crushing her face into a glower. “Haven’t you ever seen a girl before?”

He looked back down at his cards, sitting so long in silence that Westie feared he’d gone and died until he piped up, voice loud enough to belong behind a Sunday pulpit.

“Aye,” he said in a charred voice, “too rich for this old bag o’ bones,” and tossed his tobacco-smeared cards facedown on the table.

The other leprechaun was much younger than his companion. He continued to glance between his cards and Westie’s mechanical arm. His sour stench reached across the table and rustled the hot whiskey stewing in her guts. He pointed at her arm.

“How do you move that thing?” he asked.

Westie’s vision twinned. She wasn’t sure which one of him to look at. “Wintu magic.”

Both leprechauns bristled at the mention of the natives.

It wasn’t true. Her machine was just a prosthetic attached to bone and nerves.

“The tart’s trying to distract you, fool. She’s taking all your money,” the old leprechaun said to the young one with amusement in his voice.

Westie looked at James through tricky eyes and a blue curtain of smoke. “You fixing to play or not?” she said.

He smiled, tossing his offering to the table.

The smoke in the room, the smell of piss, and the drink that had gone to her head made Westie’s eyes water. The pungent sweetness of cigar smoke and the earthy smell of spittoons made her tongue feel thick and brought a salty taste to the back of her throat.

She yawned to keep back the vomit and moved her cards into her flesh hand, balling her mechanical one into a fist. The brass gears turned without sound, and clusters of thick copper wire moved like tendons.

The young leprechaun pulled at his flaking bottom lip, took a deep breath, and eased it out before laying his cards on the table and sliding his chair back in defeat. Westie fumbled with the coins, her clockwork fingers not as agile as the flesh and bone of her left hand.

“Hold on one moment, please,” James said. There was something about the way he talked, a slight drawl lingering behind certain vowels, that made Westie think all the prim talk was just an act. “You haven’t won yet.”

He splayed his cards on the table for her to see: queens.

Westie tossed her sevens onto the table and wiped at her eyes.

“Sevens?” James said with a skewed grin. There was a little white scar across his bottom lip, only visible when he smiled. “That’s brilliant. I was almost ready to fold. You have an excellent poker face.”

“Wait one blamed minute,” the young leprechaun said. He climbed onto his chair but even then couldn’t match James’s sitting height. He took hold of the starched lapels of the boy’s coat. “You been cheatin’, boy?”