Dangerous Women (40 page)

She said, “I can’t pretend I never thought about it. But I never wished for it. He’s not a bad man. He’s been good to me.”

“Takes good care of you.”

“He cleans his golf clubs after he plays a round. Has this piece of flannel he uses to wipe the faces of the irons. Takes the cars in for their scheduled maintenance. And yes, he takes good care of me.”

“Maybe that’s all you want.”

“I was willing to settle for it,” she said.

“And now you’re not?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and put her hand on me. For just a moment it was another hand, a firm but gentle hand, and I was a boy again. Just for an instant, and then that passed.

And she went on holding me, and she didn’t say anything, but I could hear her voice in my head as clearly as if she’d spoken.
Willing to settle? Not anymore, my darling, because I’ve met you, and my world has changed forever. If only something could happen to him and we could be together forever. If only—

“You want me to kill him,” I said.

“Oh my God!”

“Isn’t that where you were headed?”

She didn’t answer, breathed deeply in and out, in and out. Then she said, “Have you ever—”

“Government puts you in a uniform, gives you a rifle, sends you halfway around the world. Man winds up doing a whole lot of things he might never do otherwise.”

All of which was true, I suppose, but it had nothing much to do with me. I was never in the service.

Went to sign up once. You drift around, different things start looking good to you. Army shrink asked me a batch of questions, heard something he didn’t like in my answers, and they thanked me for my time and sent me on my way.

Have to say that man was good at his job. I wouldn’t have liked it there, and they wouldn’t have liked me much, either.

She found something else to talk about, some rambling story about some neighbor of hers. I lay there and watched her lips move without taking in what she was saying.

Why bother? What she wasn’t saying was more to the point.

Pleased with herself, I had to figure. Because she’d managed to get where she wanted to go without saying the words herself. Played it so neatly that I brought it up for her.

Like, I’m two steps ahead of you, missy. Knew where you were going, saw what a roundabout route you had mapped out for yourself, figured I’d save us some time.

Better now, looking without listening. And it was like I couldn’t hear her if I wanted to, all I could hear was her voice speaking in my head, telling me what I knew she was thinking. How we could be together for the rest of our lives, how I was all she wanted and all she needed, how we’d have a life of luxury and glamour and travel. Her voice in my head, drawing pictures of her idea of my idea of paradise.

Voices.

She moved, lay on her side. Stopped talking, and I stopped hearing that other voice, and she ran a hand the length of my body. And kissed my face and my neck, and worked her way south.

Yeah, right. To give me a hint of the crazy pleasures on offer once her husband was dead and buried. Because every man loves that, right?

Thing is, I don’t. Not since another woman took the pills I’d bought her and didn’t wake up.

One time, I had this date with a girl in my class. And she was coaching me.

You can get her to suck it. She’ll still be a virgin, she can’t get pregnant from it, and she’ll be making you happy. Plus deep down she’s plain dying to do it. But what you want to do is help her out, tell her when she’s doing something wrong. Like you’ll be
her
coach, you know?

Then she was gone, and since then I don’t like having anybody doing that to me.

That army shrink? I guess he knew his business.

Still, she got it hard.

It plays by its own rules, doesn’t it? The blood flows there or it doesn’t, and you can’t make it happen or keep it from happening. Didn’t mean I enjoyed it, didn’t mean I wanted her to keep it up. More she did it, less I liked it.

Took hold of her head, moved her away.

“Is something wrong?”

“My turn,” I said, and spread her out on the bed, and tucked a pillow under her ass, and stuck a finger in to make sure she was wet. Stuck the finger in her mouth, gave her a taste of herself.

Got on her, rode her long and hard, long and hard. She had one of those rolling orgasms that won’t quit, on and on and on, the gift that keeps on giving.

I don’t know where my mind was while this was going on. Off somewhere, tuned in to something else. Watching HBO while she was getting fucked on Showtime.

When she was done I just stayed where I was, on her and in her. Looked down at her face, jaw slack, eyes shut, and saw what I hadn’t seen earlier.

That she looked like a pig. Just had a real piggish quality to her features. Never saw it before.

Funny.

Her eyes opened. And her mouth started running, telling me it had never been like this before.

“Did you—”

“Not yet.”

“My God, you’re still hard! Is there anything—”

“Not just yet,” I said. “Something I’d like to know first. When you walked into the bar?”

“A lifetime ago,” she said. And relaxed into what she thought was going to be a stroll down memory lane. How we met, how we fell in love without a word being spoken.

I said, “What I wondered. How did you know?”

“How did I—”

“How’d you know I was the one man in there who’d be willing to kill your husband for you?”

Eyes wide. Speechless.

“What did you see? What did you think you saw?”

And my hips started working, slowly, short strokes.

“Had it all worked out in your mind,” I said. I moved my elbows so they were on her shoulders, pinning her to the bed, and my hands found her neck, circled it.

“So you’d be out of town, maybe pick up some other lucky guy to make sure you’d have an alibi. Get off good with him, because all the while you’re thinking about how I’m doing it, killing your husband. Wondering exactly how I’m doing it: Am I using a gun, a knife, a club? And you think of me doing him with my bare hands and that’s what really gets you off, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it. Couldn’t have heard a thunderclap, couldn’t have heard the world ending.

“Filling my head with happily ever after, but once he’s gone you don’t need me anymore, do you? Maybe you’d find another sucker, get him to take me off the board.”

Thrusting harder now. And my hands tightening on her throat. The terror in her eyes, Jesus, you could taste it.

Then the light went out of her eyes, and just like that she was gone.

Three, four more strokes and I got where I was going. What’s funny is I didn’t really feel it. The machinery worked, and I emptied myself into her, but you couldn’t call it sensational, because, see, there wasn’t a whole lot of sensation involved. There was a release, and that felt good, the way a piss does when you’ve been walking around with a full bladder.

Fact is, it’s like that more often than not. I’d say the army shrink could explain it, but let’s not make him into a genius. All he knew was the army was better off without me.

Most anybody’s better off without me.

Claudia, for sure. Lying there now with her throat crushed and her eyes glassy. Minute I laid eyes on her, I knew she had the whole script worked out in her mind.

How’d she know? How’d she pick me?

And if I knew all that, if I could read her script and figure out a different ending than the one she had in mind, why’d I buy her a drink? All’s said and done, how much real choice did I have in the matter once she’d gone and laid her hand on my arm?

Time to leave this town now, but who was I kidding? I’d find the same thing in the next town, or the town after that. Another roadhouse, where I might have to fight a guy or might not, but either way I’d walk out with a woman. She might not look as fine as this one, and she might have more hair besides what she had on her head, but she’d have the same plans for me.

And if I stayed out of the bars? If I went to some church socials, or Parents Without Partners, or some such?

Might work, but I wouldn’t count on it. My luck, I’d wind up in the same damn place.

Like I said, I really know how to pick ’em.

Another of the fastest-rising stars in the fantasy genre, along with writers such as Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Lynch, Lev Grossman, and K. J. Parker,
New York Times
bestseller Brandon Sanderson was chosen to finish Robert Jordan’s famous Wheel of Time sequence, left uncompleted on Jordan’s death, an immense task that Sanderson tackled with volumes such as
The Gathering Storm,
Towers of Midnight,
and
A Memory of Light
. He is also well-known for another fantasy series, the Mistborn sequence, which consists of
The Final Empire,
The Well of Ascension,
The Hero of Ages,
and
The Alloy of Law,
as well as the young adult fantasy series Alcatraz, consisting of
Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians,
Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones,
Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia,
and
Alcatraz Versus the Shattered Lens
. His other books include the novels
Elantris,
Warbreaker,
and
Firstborn,
and the start of the new Stormlight Archive series,
The Way of Kings
. He lives in American Fork, Utah, and maintains a website at brandonsanderson.com.

Here he takes us deep into the sinister silence of the Forests for the tale of a desperate and dangerous woman who will risk anything,
do
anything, to save her family, even in a place where hungry ghosts wait unseen behind every tree, and one false move means instant death …

“The one you have to watch for is the White Fox,” Daggon said, sipping his beer. “They say he shook hands with the Evil itself, that he visited the Fallen World and came back with strange powers. He can kindle fire on even the deepest of nights, and no shade will dare come for his soul. Yes, the White Fox. Meanest bastard in these parts for sure. Pray he doesn’t set his eyes on you, friend. If he does, you’re dead.”

Daggon’s drinking companion had a neck like a slender wine bottle and a head like a potato stuck sideways on the top. He squeaked as he spoke, a Lastport accent, voice echoing in the eaves of the waystop’s common room. “Why … why would he set his eyes on me?”

“That depends, friend,” Daggon said, looking about as a few overdressed merchants sauntered in. They wore black coats, ruffled lace poking out the front, and the tall-topped, wide-brimmed hats of fortfolk. They wouldn’t last two weeks out here, in the Forests.

“It depends?” Daggon’s dining companion prompted. “It depends on what?”

“On a lot of things, friend. The White Fox is a bounty hunter, you know. What crimes have you committed? What have you done?”

“Nothing.” That squeak was like a rusty wheel.

“Nothing? Men don’t come out into the Forests to do ‘nothing,’ friend.”

His companion glanced from side to side. He’d given his name as Earnest. But then, Daggon had given his name as Amity. Names didn’t mean a whole lot in the Forests. Or maybe they meant everything. The right ones, that was.

Earnest leaned back, scrunching down that fishing-pole neck of his as if trying to disappear into his beer. He’d bite. People liked hearing about the White Fox, and Daggon considered himself an expert. At least, he was an expert at telling stories to get ratty men like Earnest to pay for his drinks.

I’ll give him some time to stew,
Daggon thought, smiling to himself.
Let him worry.
Earnest would pry him for more information in a bit.

While he waited, Daggon leaned back, surveying the room. The merchants were making a nuisance of themselves, calling for food, saying they meant to be on their way in an hour. That
proved
them to be fools. Traveling at night in the Forests? Good homesteader stock would do it. Men like these, though … they’d probably take less than an hour to violate one of the Simple Rules and bring the shades upon them. Daggon put the idiots out of his mind.

That fellow in the corner, though … dressed all in brown, still wearing his hat despite being indoors. That fellow looked truly dangerous.
I wonder if it’s him,
Daggon thought. So far as he knew, nobody had ever seen the White Fox and lived. Ten years, over a hundred bounties turned in. Surely someone knew his name. The authorities in the forts paid him the bounties, after all.

The waystop’s owner, Madam Silence, passed by the table and deposited Daggon’s meal with an unceremonious thump. Scowling, she topped off his beer, spilling a sudsy dribble onto his hand, before limping off. She was a stout woman. Tough. Everyone in the Forests was tough. The ones that survived, at least.

He’d learned that a scowl from Silence was just her way of saying hello. She’d given him an extra helping of venison; she often did that. He liked to think that she had a fondness for him. Maybe someday …

Don’t be a fool,
he thought to himself as he dug into the heavily gravied food. Better to marry a stone than Silence Montane. A stone showed more affection. Likely, she gave him the extra slice because she recognized the value of a repeat customer. Fewer and fewer people came this way lately. Too many shades. And then there was Chesterton. Nasty business, that.

“So … he’s a bounty hunter, this Fox?” The man who called himself Earnest seemed to be sweating.

Daggon smiled. Hooked right good, this one was. “He’s not just a bounty hunter. He’s
the
bounty hunter. Though, the White Fox doesn’t go for the small-timers—and no offense, friend, but you seem pretty small-time.”

His friend grew more nervous. What
had
he done? “But,” the man stammered, “he wouldn’t come for me—er, pretending I’d done something, of course—anyway, he wouldn’t come in here, would he? I mean, Madam Silence’s waystop, it’s protected. Everyone knows that. Shade of her dead husband lurks here. I had a cousin who saw it, I did.”