Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“Say it,” said the monster, his face close to mine.

“Tom Worecski,” I said. He let my hand drop. I was afraid to flex it, for fear that he’d notice he’d left it attached to my wrist.

“Good for you! Now, you go sit on the sofa there. Babe, come over here and give us a kiss.”

As she passed me on the other side of the table, Dana’s eyes cut away from mine. She went to Tom and put her arms around him. He didn’t turn his face to her, but she kissed his jaw and his neck and the hollow of his collarbone while he smiled at me. It wasn’t Albrecht’s seduction. It was Tom’s. I wondered whether anybody would care if I was sick on the rug.

Albrecht set his glass down on the cabinet. “God damn it, Krueger, she’s not—”

“A. A., if you keep your mouth shut, not only will I let you live, I’ll think about not walkin’ you through Nicollet Market buck naked with your dick in your fist. You got that?”

Tom had raised his voice. Albrecht’s face, innocent of sun, flushed to magenta, then went bloodless. “You need me. My staff won’t listen to you.”

“We been through this before. I need you like a goddamn dog needs shoes, A.A. I figured if I let you run all the little shit, it would keep you out of my way. But if that’s not workin’ anymore, I can find some other asshole to run the little shit. So you just sit behind your big desk and buy movies that you think’ll help you get rid of me, and stay the fuck out of my way.”

He was stroking Dana absently, as if she were a cat on his lap. She had her face turned into his shoulder; whatever expression was there, none of us could see it. Albrecht watched Tom and Dana with a look that reminded me a little of Cassidy. I was glad I had my back to Cassidy.

“It’s not Hellriders ,” I said to Albrecht.

“Nobody ever thought it was,” said Tom. “But we didn’t want to discourage you right off, if you thought you needed an excuse to come up.” He frowned over Dana’s head, and gazed around the room as if he missed something. “So where’s Her Highness?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t fuck with me. You know what I’m talking about.”

My hands closed in reflex over my knees. The right one hurt.

He saw it; it made him happy again. “Well, shit, Myra and Dusty work for me, you know. When Franny had her little joke on Myra the other night, don’t you think Myra would’ve told me?”

“She told you who it was?”

“She didn’t have to. Dusty told me some of the stuff Myra said when she wasn’t Myra, and I knew right off. There ain’t anybody jaws on like that but Franny.”

That didn’t explain how he knew someone had come up with me, or how he knew I wasn’t really there to sell A.A. Albrecht a faked videotape. The only thing that did—

“I expect she’s listening at a keyhole,” Tom said cheerfully. He stared at me as he added, louder, “So, Fran? You come in here, or I’m gonna break this kid’s neck. You know I can.”

Maybe she wouldn’t care. But I thought I ought to tell her, at least, that he hadn’t started yet. “I’d hate that,” I said. “Besides, you haven’t finished my hand.” Stall. You’ve lost the advantage of surprise, Frances . At least pick your moment.

“Thatagirl,” Tom called out, “come on in and have a seat. Hell, we got us enough folks for a party.”

I twisted around on the couch. The door beside Cassidy swung slowly open to admit Frances, alone, with her pistol. Why hadn’t she shot—ah, of course. She wasn’t here to kill Tom’s body. The head fight had begun already; I could see it in Frances’s tight-closed lips, the net of squint lines around Tom’s eyes.

I wanted desperately to know the range of a Horseman’s powers. Because I’d thought of another solution to the problem of isolating Tom Worecski. Frances could eliminate Tom’s options for switching bodies. Bang, bang, bang. Bang. Maybe she’d meant to all along, and it was my bad luck I’d ended up here, as one of Tom’s options.

“Someone gave us away,” I said to Frances.

“I was beginning to think someone must have. Everything was going according to plan.” She kept her eyes, and the pistol, on Tom.

By logic, someone in the room ought to have wrenched it out of her hand by now. No, if anyone approached her, anyone who wasn’t Tom, she could shoot. Tom could order one of them to get the gun. I began to think I ought to be doing something besides sitting and watching, but what could I do? I wasn’t supposed to be there. I wasn’t part of this fight. It had nothing to do with me. I was caught between the two of them.

“Go sit beside your friend, babe,” Tom said, and Dana let go of him. Her face, when she had her back to Tom, was vacant with fear. She sat down close to me and clung to my sleeve, where Tom couldn’t see it.

“Put it down, Franny. It’s not gonna do you any good.”

“Oh, I don’t know. A loud noise, some nasty stains—it would have a certain nostalgia value at the very least.” The room was cool, but there was a light gloss of sweat above Frances’s eyebrows.

“Huh. I thought they were the good old days. But I figured you’d got religion or something. All the fun we used to have, and here you are, with a self-righteous stick up your ass, out to blow my brains out for bein’ just as bad as you.” He took a step forward, grinning, teeth clenched intermittently. “And you know that’s true. I’ve never done anything you didn’t do.”

I’d heard that before, from Mick about Frances. She’d denied it. And I remembered what Tom Worecski’s death sentence was for. I must have moved; Tom’s gaze flicked to me and back to Frances.

“You didn’t tell anybody?” he said. “Oh, my. Let you who are without sin cast the first stone.”

Frances also grinned; like Tom, she seemed to be doing it at least half because of the pressure. “If I’d washed my sins away first, I wouldn’t have been able to minister to the rest of you.”

Tom snorted. “You loved it. You always figured you had a right to run the world. You thought being part of the committee that was gonna blow it to hell was no more than you deserved. You wanted to show those bastards who hadn’t had the sense to get together and elect you Goddess.”

“That’s not true.” Frances spoke without heat, as if he’d misstated the time and she was correcting that. But the heat was there, underneath, unspoken, a slow tide of it. “You had to lie to get me to sign on. You never once planned to hold the country hostage, but I believed it. I thought I was working for peace. I may have been criminally stupid and blind as a cave fish, but I didn’t think we meant to actually drop the Big One.”

“Shit, Franny, then you were the only one.”

“A loner to the very end.” Her right hand was trembling, barely.

“Is it true?” Tom asked the air. “Was she really pure as the driven snow, even though she executed half the damn launch sequence her own self?”

“We were supposed to hold and wait to abort,” Frances snapped, her face white. Some of it was surely whatever Tom was doing to her head. But she looked like a woman watching a rerun of her worst nightmare. She had done it. She had lived with it all these decades. And she’d dedicated herself to seeing that the people who’d shared the blame wouldn’t live with anything anymore. I’d been right all the time, to be afraid of her.

“I’ll bet the jury’s done deliberating,” Tom said. “Awful sorry I couldn’t get twelve of ‘em, but one good one oughta be enough for this. Whattaya say, Skin? Innocent or guilty?”

In Albrecht’s darkened office, someone moved hesitantly toward the door. It was Mick Skinner.