Shadows West

Chapter 1: The Valley of the Shadow of Death

This story was written for mew-serene's Zakuro contest. I was hoping to have the second chapter written before I posted this one, but since I'm cutting it pretty close with the initial entering deadline, I figured I should get this up while I can.

Cultural and historical notes (that you can skip if you don't care): Vinita is a real town in Oklahoma, and it was the first place in the state to get electricity, though that most likely happened well after this fic took place. On the other hand, I doubt Vinita had a freak genius like Ryou/Elliot living there in real life; he could probably electrify a town if he wanted to. All the blood transfusion nonsense (and it's utter nonsense, though I guess no more so than the TMM canon is) is because DNA wasn't really understood yet, so there's no possibility of genetic engineering. "Plainflower" is a corruption of "wisteria plain"—itself the English translation of "Fujiwara"—used because wisteria is not native to the southwestern U.S. "Xiàn Bǐng" is just Chinese for "pie," and "Celestial" is the period-appropriate term for a Chinese person. Zakuro/Renée's appearance is modeled on a DC Comics character, Tallulah Black.

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters mentioned herein. The title of this fic comes from a pretty terrible DC comic, and the chapter title is, of course, from Psalms.

Renée Plainflower looked over her shoulder whenever she heard the slightest noise, and pulled her coat closer around her to stop herself shivering. She was jumpy; that was all: her business in town had taken much longer than she'd anticipated, and she wasn't relishing the long walk home in the dark. That was all.

As she passed through the small cluster of darkened buildings that made up downtown Vinita, she unslung her hunting rifle from her back. She couldn't see far enough in the nearly moonless night for it to be much use as a gun, but it was a passable club, and it made her feel safer.

All of a sudden, the world went quiet. Even in the dead of winter, there was always a little bit of noise, even if it was just the cold wind rattling through some shoddy old building. But now, it seemed as though all sound had been drained from the world. She clutched the cold metal of the rifle more tightly and whipped her head this way and that, ready to attack if something sprung out of the terrible silence. Her long hair, the color of lavender and ashes, whirled behind her in the darkness like a comet's tail.

At the shock of the first incision, her rifle tumbled unused to the ground.

o()o

Renée awoke groggily, her whole body aching like she'd lost a fight. Bad. She tried to roll over on a mattress which—when she stopped to think about it—didn't feel much like her wool one. But movement was agony, so she settled gingerly onto her back again, gritting her teeth and waiting for the pain to subside. Bit by bit, she opened her eyes—well, her eye. Something was pressing down on the right side of her face, and nothing good was happening beneath it.

And, as she'd suspected, she sure as hell wasn't in her cabin. Everything she could see (which wasn't much, 'cause she was lying on her back with only one good eye) was steadily yellowish, and even though she couldn't see the source, she could swear that the light was from an incandescent lamp. Where was she?

She groaned and tried to roll over again, more slowly this time. Pain flared up, just like before, but she was ready for it this time, and she persevered. When she'd gotten fully on her side, she could see more of the room, which looked like it could have been the bedroom of any house in Vinita. Gawd, had she gotten drunk and gone to bed with a stranger? That wouldn't account for the bruises, unless he was a particularly rough son of a bitch.

"Ah, you're awake. Welcome back, Miss Plainflower. How are you feeling?" The voice was male and unfamiliar, which only confirmed her suspicions.

"Where are we?" she asked with a groan. Her mouth felt strange, like the skin on either side of it was being stretched taut, and her voice came out as a low growl, though that may have been because her throat was so dry. She remembered... Nothing, really. A heap of images that she couldn't make heads nor tails of.

"You're in my sickroom, Miss Plainflower. I'm afraid you were attacked."

"What?" she exclaimed. "What happened ta me?"

"I don't know for sure," the unfamiliar man replied, staying infuriatingly out of her field of vision. "I found you unconscious behind a building. You were cut up pretty badly. Do you remember how you ended up there?"

She tried to shake her head, but that hurt too, like she was rubbing against sandpaper instead of sheets. "No," she croaked. "Ah was in town gettin' supplies. That's as much as I remember." The man frowned. Renée couldn't see him, but she could smell his expression somehow. She tried to look around for him, but the action was painful and pointless.

"Lie still. You're healing, and I don't want your wounds opening up again."

"Where the hell are ya?" she snapped. "Ah wouldn't have ta move around so damned much if ya'd just come where Ah kin see ya!"

He stepped into her severely restricted field of vision. It turned out he was a beautiful white man, with sun-yellow hair and sky-blue eyes. She hadn't been expecting that. Why would a pretty white fella take in someone like her?

The man must have seen the alarm on her face, because he held out his hands and said hastily, "Don't worry. I haven't done anything except treat your injuries." He was lying. Renée didn't know how, but she knew. "My name is Dr. Elliot Grant."

There were so many questions she wanted to ask him, but she settled for one in particular that was niggling at her. "How'd ya know my name?"

"While you were recuperating, I did some asking around. It wasn't difficult—or do you imagine that these parts are teeming with Comanche women living all by themselves?"

She didn't dignify that with a response, and she wasn't sure how she felt about this man knowing anything about her. But he had taken her in when he could have left her to die in the street, and—aside from that last snide comment—he had been nothing but clinically polite to her since she'd woken up. She tried to tell herself that the fact that he was brain-numbingly handsome didn't play into her feelings at all.

o()o

As she recuperated—a weeks-long process that was terribly boring now that she was out of her coma—her mind was consumed more and more with the thought of getting back at whoever had done this to her. She didn't know who had done it, of course, but that didn't matter. Eventually, once she got out of this damnable bed, she would find out, even if she had to rip all of Vinita apart to do it.

Dr. Grant was in and out as she recovered. He was never gone for more than a couple days, and he was almost always home at night. Renée wished she could say that it mattered much whether he was there or not, but that would have been a lie. For all his extreme beauty, Renée increasingly found herself growing resentful of the doc. He was nearly unfailingly polite, but his refined manner was distancing. Every so often, she'd catch a flash of sarcasm or passion in his voice, but he always suppressed it quickly. She wished he wouldn't: that Dr. Grant sounded like someone who'd be much more interesting to talk to.

One thing she did like about his absences, though, was that they gave her an opportunity to get out of bed. Moving still hurt pretty bad, and since she never knew how long Grant would be gone, she couldn't risk any long excursions unless she wanted to chance being caught. Mostly, she just practiced walking, which hurt like the dickens, but which she'd have to get used to again sooner or later. The carpet in Grant's house must have been much thicker than she was used to, because, despite the clumsy stiffness with which she moved, her footfalls seemed whisper-quiet.

It took three days of dedicated searching whenever Grant stepped out, but she eventually found the clothes that she'd been wearing when she was attacked. They were in even worse shape than she herself was, little more than rags. The queer thing was, though, that they were cut up very cleanly, like someone really had wanted to use them for cleaning their windows. They smelled overwhelmingly of blood, so much so that she couldn't bring them close enough to examine them without her eyes watering.

Renée was shocked to find her rifle laying beneath the clothes. The hell kinda mugger left a perfectly good gun behind? Well, however it had gotten here, Renée was powerful glad to see it. Once she got her strength back, she was of a mind to track down whoever'd done this to her. She was itching to try it out, to make sure she hadn't lost her knack after being laid up, but she couldn't exactly shoot it off in the doctor's house.

Although she was in a back room, Renée heard the front door open, and she froze. After a moment of motionless silence, she put the rifle and the remains of her clothes back where she had found them as quickly and quietly as she could manage. On silent feet, she eased the door open, hoping that she could make it back to her bed before Grant came back to check on her. She hadn't actually heard him come any further in.

And yet as soon as the door was open a crack, there he was. He grabbed the door out of her surprised hands and flung it wide open.

"What are you doing up?" he demanded. Renée drew herself up to her full height and looked down at him. The doctor was a scary sumbitch when he was angry, but Renée was determined not to let herself be cowed.

"It's about time Ah got back ta walkin'," she said, trying not to sound defensive. "Ah'm not gonna recuperate if Ah'm stuck in bed." Keeping up her proud posture hurt, but not as bad as she'd expected. Maybe she really was recovering. Her voice, even though she was feeling much better, was still a low rasp, as though the inside of her throat had been cut up too. She figured that in this particular circumstance it made her sound stronger, but Dr. Grant just looked her up and down as though she was a fish wriggling on the end of his line.

"I reckon you're right, Ms. Plainflower," he replied. "You're looking much better, and if you have the energy to go snooping 'round my house, it would be foolish of me to keep you confined to a sickbed." He paused, and for a second, Renée thought she'd managed to win a discussion with the doctor. "However, I will not have you overexerting yourself. As such, I'll be overseeing your physical recovery as long as you remain in my care."

"And what makes ya think that Ah need ta stay in yer care?" she growled. There was something about the way Grant talked that rankled her. She could feel the little hairs on the back of her neck stand up as she bristled, peeved. When she stared at him, he stared right back. Shit, he was pretty. Eventually, Renée had to look away from the intense blueness of his eyes.

"I saved your life, Ms. Plainflower, and as such, I am unwilling to watch you throw it away because you were too reckless to heal properly. Now, if you're ready, I think we should see how well you've recovered. Here, take these."

He picked up a parcel off a nearby table and thrust it into her arms. She mutely tore off the wrappings, revealing a pair of Colts—clunky, old-looking ones.

"The hell're these for?"

"I don't know how you were with a gun before, but if you want to have any hope of tracking down the man who attacked you, you're going to need to learn to adjust for that eye." Involuntarily, one of Renée's hands moved up to the patch on the right side of her face. The eye had been unsalvageable, the doctor had said. While she hadn't really noticed much of a difference in her vision, she'd been stuck indoors, and there wasn't much to see in Grant's little house.

She hadn't dared to find out what she looked like now. There were blank spots on the walls where mirrors might have hung at one point, but the doctor must've gotten rid of 'em. Well, that was fine with Renée; she'd even been careful not to catch her reflection in windows. The doctor'd said she healed well, but she could still feel the sting of her injuries whenever she moved to fast: lines of pain across her skin like she was a fancy doll, cracking to pieces. She imagined she looked a fright.

Before all of this, she'd always known she was pretty for a woman her height, but it had never mattered. She didn't want to work in a dance hall or brothel, though she could have made good money doing either. And the men of the town were boors, crude and ugly and not worth her time even if she trusted white men to treat her as an equal. No, she'd never really thought about how she looked. But that didn't mean she was willing to start thinking of herself as the scarred, one-eyed hag she was.

"Ah'm not gonna have any chance of findin' him, anyhow," she said. "Ah told ya, Ah don't remember nothin' about who attacked me." Grant's eyes brightened, sparkling like springs in the desert. He looked as animated as Renée had ever seen him.

"Actually," he said, "I've been doing some research on that, and I think I know who attacked you."

"And?" Renée prompted, and immediately hated herself for it. Grant was clearly pausing just to get a reaction out of her, and for a moment, she felt like smacking him with a pistol handle. But he sounded so excited, so...genuine that she couldn't resent him too much.

"His name is Xiàn Bǐng. He is a doctor, or at least he was back in China. I, ah, I had heard of other incidents like your attack, but I had somewhat dismissed Xiàn Bǐng as a folk tale until I started looking into what happened to you. Apparently there was a suspicious-looking Celestial medicine seller in town the week you were attacked."

Renée hugged the pistols to her chest, excited by the prospect of finding the bastard who cut her up. "D'ya know how ta find him?"

Grant shook his head. "No, but I'm working on it. It will be at least another fortnight before you're strong enough to do any serious traveling, plus however long it takes you to re-learn to shoot."

o()o

In point of fact, Renée was surprised at how quickly she re-learned gunplay. She had never used a pistol before, and the old dragoons Grant had given her had a bit of a kick to them, but she familiarized herself with them right quick, and soon, to her continuing astonishment, she was a better shot—with her rifle as well as the revolvers—than she'd been back when she had two good eyes.

When Grant came out to observe her progress, as he did whenever he didn't have other duties to attend to, she resolved to bring it up.

"Did ya somehow make me a better shot when ya were sewin' me up?" she asked, hoping that it sounded like a joke. But he frowned.

"That was not a side effect I had foreseen, no." The doctor sounded stiff as a corpse, and he smelled absurdly nervous. That, in turn, made Renée feel like her own skin was trying to crawl away. Grant had opened up a bit over the past weeks, but he was always very sure of himself, almost to an annoying degree.

"What do ya mean?" she barked. "What'd ya do that there would be side effects?"

"Put the gun down first." Renée had been working with her rifle, which wouldn't be much use at this range, but she clutched it tighter to her nonetheless. If Grant was worried that she'd shoot him after he said his piece, well, she wanted to be able to shoot him. "I mean it, Renée. If you want to know what happened to you, put that rifle down."

His eyes got bluer when he was angry, Renée reckoned. Right now, they leached all the color out of the sky. She set her gun down on the dusty ground and held up her hands.

"All right. Ah'm unarmed. What'd ya do ta me?" The doctor broke eye contact, something she wasn't used to. Usually, she was the one who had to look away.

"When I found you, you had lost a lot of blood, and I couldn't round up a human donor in time. The only sample I had available was..." Renée stiffened. She still hated Grant's habit of dramatic pauses. "from a timber wolf."

"Ya put animal blood in me?" Renée snarled. Grant had been right to make her drop her gun. She wouldn't have shot him, but she couldn't guarantee that she wouldn't have cracked him across the head with it. Instead, she slapped him hard across the face.

He crumpled under the blow, raising a cloud of reddish dust as he hit the ground. Renée's anger drained away enough to be worried about him. She reached down to help him up, but he waved her off and picked himself up, brushing the dust from his trousers with one hand and rubbing his cheek with the other.

"It was either that or let you die," he replied bitterly. Renée could see an angry pink handprint beginning to form where she had hit him. "I made the right choice. Besides, the introduction of lupine blood seems to have improved your accuracy. You have nothing to be upset about, Ms. Plainflower."

Renée's mind flashed to the other things that she'd noticed since getting attacked, wondering if, say, her improved sense of smell was due to the strange blood in her veins.

"Ya made the right choice," she said finally. "But ya could've told me as much when Ah first woke up." And damned if she was going to apologize for hitting him. Grant could think whatever he wanted about how she should feel, but that was a hell of a thing to drop on someone.

An uncomfortable silence descended before Dr. Grant cleared his throat. "The reason I came out here, actually, is because I have a lead on Xiàn Bǐng. Apparently, he's out in New Mexico Territory, a couple days' ride from here."

"That's not much of a help," Renée said. "New Mexico's a big place. How do ya propose we go about findin' this Xiàn Bǐng in the great big desert?"

"Ah, well, he went out there via the new railroad, not two days ago. That leaves a very small number of places where he could reasonably have gotten to."

"Are we gonna go out there on the train?" Fear gripped her at the mere thought. How could she go out in public, looking like she did, let alone get on a train, where she'd be trapped for days with people who would surely look at her as a freak?

"I don't want him to know we're coming for him, and if we took the train, it's possible that someone could inform him of our intent. No, I reckon we're going to have to travel overland. Can you ride a horse?"

"Of course," she said. Really, of the two of them, Grant was the one who didn't look like he could ride. He had the air of a man used to carriages.

"Wonderful. We'll set out tomorrow. Is there anything you need before then? I won't be able to bring a full set of medical tools with me."

Renée took a deep breath. She didn't want to do this, but it was now or never. "Do you have a mirror?" Whatever Grant had been expecting her to say, that wasn't it. He froze, and she didn't need her superlative sense of smell to tell that she'd shocked him.

"I'm not sure that's a good—"

"I need to know what I look like before I let people see me, Dr. Grant," she said, hating how much it sounded like begging. "Please, just give me a mirror." He considered her for a moment before nodding and leading her back to his house. The mirror was hidden in the back of the pantry, with its reflective side turned toward the wall. Grant handed it over, reluctantly, with its back still turned.

Renée found herself holding her breath and closing her eye as she turned the mirror over. She had to force herself to look. As soon as she opened her eye, she wanted to snap it shut and never look again. But if she couldn't look at herself now, she reckoned, she'd never get up the sand to do it. So she kept staring at the horrible thing in the mirror.

Her hair was the same purpley-gray it had always been, true, but Xiàn Bǐng must have cut it off when he was cutting her up, because it was much shorter than it should have been and uneven besides. Her skin had started to regain its color in the time she'd spent practicing shooting, but she still looked ashen and unwell. The worst part, though, were the scars, livid pale lines that crisscrossed her face like cracks in an old road.

If she squinted, she could still see the beautiful woman she had been, but that only made the reality worse. She had to stop herself from smashing the mirror in disgust. Grant came up behind her, and, irrationally, her hands flew to cover her face. He'd seen her, of course—and she didn't want to think about how much worse she would look without his ministrations—but now that she knew the extent of the damage, she felt a terrible need to hide her shame. He was so beautiful; she didn't deserve to exist in the same world as him.

Gently, he took her hands in his and lowered them. She tried to twist away, but he wrestled both of her wrists into one hand and used the other to grasp her chin and turn her face back to his.

"Look at me," Grant commanded, and she couldn't look away from his hard blue eyes. "Listen to me: This is not your fault, Renée. You can't think that this reflects on you—you were attacked by a madman, and you were strong enough to live through it. That's all. Scars are a damn sight better than being dead."

"But look at me!" she moaned, too devastated to muster a more complex response.

"I am," he responded. He was, too—staring at her so hard that it was uncomfortable, as though his gaze was a physical force. "And I see a strong, intelligent, beautiful woman." He let go of her chin and hands and kissed her hard.