Mutt managed to get me up onto the saddle behind him.

  “I told you to stay away,” I groaned as we raced along, wind pushing my hair back across my face.

  “I did not listen,” Mutt said.

  I chuckled through my clenched teeth. “Yeah. I like this goodbye better.”

  Mutt reached behind to try to help stabilize me. Time diminished some of the widespread effects of the silver. Having no blood nor a working internal system helped. In the likes of a Neph or werewolf, their blood would carry it throughout their whole body in a matter of minutes.

  With his help, I sat upright. However, I still had to rest against his back so I could get a good view in front of us.

  The train sped along, but we gained on it fast. Problem was, I wasn’t sure how long Timp could keep up the pace. Rosa was clearly visible at the caboose, gripping the rail as tight as she could as she called out to us. I couldn’t hear a word of what she was saying.

  When she started pointing to our north and shouting, I saw one word on her lips clear as day: “Ace.”

  A bullet whizzed overhead. I looked left and saw him, riding a horse downhill straight at us, sunlight almost glowing against his ridiculous white attire. Only his wasn’t a horse like Timp. The thing was all bones and some rotting flesh—reanimated from the dead, no doubt by his necromancer friend from Crescent City. Which meant that unlike Timp, it wouldn’t tire one bit.

  Mutt reached for his bow, but I stopped him. “Just get me to Rosa, and get out of here!”

  Mutt ducked forward to push Timp faster than was reasonable to ask of her. Ace, meanwhile, kept shooting and hitting nothing as he closed the distance, the angle he was on tough at these speeds. Dirt pocked around Timp’s hooves, zipped by my head more than I was comfortable with.

  We were damn close, and Rosa stretched her hand over the rail.

  “C’mon, girl!” I hollered, hoping the sound of my voice would help spur Timp along.

  Three horse lengths stood between us and the train. Then two. One.

  She and I clasped hands and Mutt veered Timp right, allowing the shifting momentum to propel me over the rail and onto the grated platform. As I landed, I took Rosa with me, and we plowed through the back door into the cabin.

  Timp and I made eye contact one last time as I looked back. Her powerful whinny rattled the air like a thunderclap.

  Her eyes were clear as day. No tears this time. This was a far more fitting farewell. Danger had fueled our kinship time-and-time again. So it should be that it would end that way.

  “Tsaaku mia, taibo!” Mutt shouted in his language. “Ride fast and true!”

  And then, they were gone, turned off toward the horizon where Timp could go and rest on her laurels once and for all. I’d been so focused on her, I hadn’t even noticed the passengers in this car having fled to the far end of it. In the other direction, left to truly choose between us and hurting me through Timperina, Ace and his undead horse fell in behind the train in hot pursuit of Rosa and me.

  “Remember our last time on a train, Crowley!” Ace shouted. “I should’ve dropped you then and there!” He fired through the open door, missing us, but hitting one of the passengers.

  “Garrett!” a woman shrieked. I had to ignore it.

  Rosa ripped the rifle off my back and fired back at Ace. It was a damn fine shot, if not for the movement of the train combined with his galloping. Meant that what should have been a silvery brain-shot merely sent his hat fluttering in the wind.

  “James, come on!” Rosa helped me to my feet, and I limped down the aisle behind her, once again placing myself between her and danger.

  “Everyone, to the next car!” I barked at the passengers, who were no doubt equally terrified and confused by what was happening. Not just the shootout, but me, body so riddled with holes that I should’ve been dead, not to mention the steaming silver cloud around me.

  Rosa fired over me every so often as we advanced. The passengers stampeded from one car to the next, including the woman who’d cried out, struggling to pull her husband along. One older man got trampled entirely. By the time we reached the door and the short, shaking bridge between cars, Ace had leaped up to the caboose’s back rail.

  “Just die!” Rosa screamed like a madwoman, unloading every round she had down the aisle. A few bullets pinged off metal, the rest spattered all around Ace’s chest in streams of radiant silver. She kept firing even when we heard the telltale click, click, click of an empty chamber.

  Ace held himself up in the doorway, head hanging. When he looked up, his shit-eating grin greeted us.

  “I’ll give it to you, Crowley, you found yourself a firecracker,” he said. Then he whistled at her while patting the cursed harmonica he’d used on her once before. “You and me are going to have a lot of fun this time, darling.”

  Knowing full well I couldn’t take him in my current condition, I pushed Rosa into the next car before she could do something foolish, and slammed the door to the first. Then I wrestled the rifle from her and turned back to glare through the window at Ace.

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  It all took so much concentration, I fell to my knees in the open doorway of the second car, facing the bridge between them. Earth rumbled by, so loud I couldn’t hear anything at all.

  Not the terrified passengers.

  Not Rosa behind me.

  Being an unfeeling, undead Black Badge had a few perks—the most useful being a total lack of restraint when exerting muscles. Normal people hold back whether they mean to or not. No one wants to break themselves.

  Call it super-strength, though I’ve fought beasts with power like that and it didn’t really compare. But against manmade contraptions, and fueled by the deep burning of silver poisoning? Well, it was something I knew Ace hadn’t learned about his current state yet.

  Hoisting my rifle, I bashed the butt into the locking mechanism joining the two cars. I beat that son of a bitch harder than humanly possible. Screaming at the top of my lungs, I did it repeatedly, bending the metal to my will until, finally, the metal cracked and the cars dislodged.

  At the same time, Ace pushed through the door and grabbed the barrel of my Winchester. “You can’t run from me.”

  I released the gun, and he fell backward. In doing so, I nearly toppled out onto the tracks myself. Rosa saved me, heaving me back into her arms. She held on tight.

  The rails screeched as Ace’s car came free, gradually slowing until there was a growing chasm between us. He stood in the doorway, half scowling, half grinning from the joy of a good chase.

  “Don’t you see, Crowley!” he yelled. “There’s nowhere on God’s green Earth where I won’t find you.”

  “That’s all right!” I shouted back. “It’s fun watching you lose!” Messed up as I was, there was no condition I could be in that would keep me from taking jabs at my old boss. Silver be damned.

  “You think this is winning?” His voice grew fainter with distance. “Your friend Chapelwaite has marshals all over looking for you two!” He gave his cursed harmonica a playful toss, re-catching it in his open palm. “I own him now, that’s right! So keep running! Have fun! In the meantime, I’ll burn Revelation and those bastards who hung me to the fucking ground!” He was so far then, I could only hear his echo. “You hear me, Crowley? Their blood is on you!”

  Rosa’s arms moved off me. Only she was enough to tear my heated gaze away from Ace. I looked back to find her as fearful as all the passengers cowering to the opposite end of the car, crammed in with others, half crying from loss.

  “What have we done?” she whispered.

  “He’s bluffing,” I replied, knowing full well that was probably a lie. His angelic handler wouldn’t be pleased with him taking a detour like that, but that’s Heaven’s own damn fault for being foolish enough to take him under their employ. He might do it. Might open Picklefinger’s throat like… well… a jar of pickles, just for the kick of it. That really was a secondary concern after what he’d just told me—that it had been Chapelwaite who’d sent the feds after us. Not for Judas or his own designs, but for fucking Ace Ryker. Another weapon in his arsenal.

  He’d stolen the free will of a powerful man in the capital—a man whose only crime was helping me. I couldn’t even imagine the discord Ace would be able to sow if it, too, tickled his fancy.

  “You don’t know that,” Rosa said.

  “It doesn’t matter!” I snapped, causing her to flinch. “Do you understand what he just told us? He’s controlling the US Marshals, Rosa. Him.”

  “And that’s somehow worse than necromancers and werewolves?”

  “They’re men, Rosa. They don’t need to hide. They can go anywhere. Be anywhere.”

  She stood and looked down her nose at me. “You’re the one who wanted to run!”

  I winced, unsure if it was because of the pain racking my whole body or her words of accusation. “Yeah, well, I think it’s time we take the offensive. To the capital. To free Chapelwaite and take away Ace’s advantage.”

  And that was when it hit me. Chapelwaite may have been a power player with the US Marshals, but that was just a cover for his true duty as a mortal servant to Judas and his vampires. I had no idea where Judas had vanished to after Crescent City, but I remembered the way he looked at Rosa when he perceived her power. The fear in his eyes, which I didn’t think he was capable of feeling.

  If we could save Chapelwaite and somehow reach Judas, he might be able to shed some light on what Rosa truly was and why everyone was so damned obsessed with having her. Even if not, maybe he could teach her to control her powers. Harness them. And then maybe, just maybe, we could be the ones making the scions of Heaven and Hell run from us.

  “Marshals are after us, and you want to go straight to them?” Rosa asked.

  I couldn’t win. First, she blamed me for running, and now, for wanting to take the fight to their front door.

  “Over my dead body,” a man grumbled.

  Rosa’s eyes went wide as Marshal A.D. Wassel snuck up behind her and pressed his gun to the back of her head. Apparently, it wasn’t him that I’d smashed in the leg. Instead, in the ruckus, he must’ve left his men behind to board the train ahead of us to cut us off.

  “Put down the gun, Marshal,” I said, struggling to keep my composure. “You’ve got this wrong. You’re all being played.”

  “We do the playing, outlaw!”

  “You’re being a damned fool. Listen, take me to Chapelwaite. He’ll tell you.”

  His eyebrows knitted together. “Who the hell is Chaff-and-wait?”

  That was a reveal I hadn’t been expecting. This Wassel didn’t even know Chapelwaite? “The marshal who gave the orders.”

  “Oh, right. That pansy-ass in the capital, signing papers while we foot the bill.” He sneered. “No, like I said, bringing you back alive won’t cut it here. Stray bullets do strange things. I believe we are done with any substantive business, James Crowley.”

  The hammer on his pistol cocked. The effects of silver had waned, but it still made me too slow to be useful. As he pulled the trigger, Rosa whipped around, screaming. I heard the gunshot go off, though no bullet emerged. Instead, the pistol’s barrel peeled apart in ribbons, and Rosa jabbed him in the chest with her palms.

  The air around the impact rippled visibly, like a stone thrown into water. As if she’d redirected the very energy of the bullet. Wassel flew up into ceiling with so much force, it dented the metal. He struggled there for a moment, shuddering under the weight of it all. A pained wince drew sharp across his face, and he tried to let out a cry. Then, half his bones slid through his skin before he crumpled to the floor in a messy heap of blood, bone, and organs, with yet more innards trickling down.

  I had to hand it to the passengers present. Sure, they squealed. Who wouldn’t? But most were so awestruck, they just stared, mouths agape. Then the puking started at the sight of the carnage. Again, couldn’t blame them. I’d seen many ugly things in my dual lifetimes, and few were more disgusting than what I’d just witnessed. A grown man, basically unfolded from the inside out, chunky viscera dripping from the ceiling.

  Rosa remained with her arms and palms still outstretched, in complete disbelief. I gently took her by the waist to sit her down, and once she was there, wouldn’t you know it… she vomited too. I held her hair in a ponytail and rubbed her back while she emptied her stomach.

  The silver made it tough to think about doing more than comfort her, but she’d taken action. Now it was my turn. Pulling my pistol, I aimed it over her back at all the passengers.

  “Nobody leaves this car,” I ordered.

  I couldn’t have anyone running all the way through and convincing the conductor to stop as soon as possible. We were headed east, and that was exactly the direction we needed to go.

  I’d never been to the capital. Never even been close.

  There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.