The Bone Orchard
Dusk had fallen, cold and gray. Now there was a dull, ashen moon shining fitfully through frayed threads of cloud and throwing faint, miserable light on the small town.
From the balcony, he could just make out the graveyard - the bone orchard, as he'd heard it called before - drab, badly tended and dismally bare. It had never touched him before, just how barren it was, but then he knew none of the folk buried there, with their shabby headstones, worn epitaphs, and long-forgotten names.
He turned his head, looking back into the dimly lit clinic; from where he stood, he could just make out the curve of a too-pale face on a thin pillow, and one limp hand fallen from the bed.
Most likely Ezra expected to be forgotten before long... and it might be too late, far too late, to tell him otherwise. The thought of putting him in that desolate ground hurt Larabee like the hell they both professed not to believe in, that Josiah even now was praying for him to escape.
Chris looked again at the shadowy figure down in the bone orchard, the gaunt suggestion of a man, half-hidden in darkness, standing under the dead tree.
It was All Souls' Eve.
His hands clenched a little on the rough wood. "You can't have him," he whispered to the darkness.
The damn business with the governor, his hired assassin, and Mary Travis was over, in an ugly, unsatisfactory way that might leave the evil festering, but thankfully gone from his own. And the even more damned problem of the $10,000 would be too, if they knew where it was. Last thing anyone knew, Josiah had given it to Ezra, he said 'for safekeeping', but when Standish had thrown himself in the way of a bullet meant for Mary, the money hadn't been on him, or anywhere else they could find. Wherever the man had hidden it, it was staying hidden. Ezra was always good at hiding...
Not that any of the six of them cared overmuch about the money, except for the trouble in town if folks thought it was somewhere for the taking. Personally, Chris didn't care if they did. It wasn't worth the life it was costing. If Ezra had taken the money and run... he pushed that thought away, because it would most likely be his own, or Mary's, life slowly bleeding out under Nathan's desperate hands. Right now he didn't care.
The ghosts of his own words, his mistrust and his harshness, came back to him, mockingly tossed on his mind's echo into the darkness, and it hurt.
He could now see Nathan's shadow across the bed. Buck was also in there, refusing to leave, trying with the life and warmth that he always had more than enough of, to will his friend back from wherever Ezra seemed to be. JD and Vin were on patrol, knowing as they all did that trouble could come looking while their own trouble overwhelmed them; and truth be told, both were grateful for something to do other than wait. Chris himself wouldn't leave until it was over... one way or the other.
He turned away, back towards the bone orchard.
And he recalled, as in a nightmare, a tale told to him long ago, a chilling tale of how if you saw the ghost of a man in the churchyard on All Souls' Eve, that man was meant to die before the years' end. Or something like that, Josiah might know the whole of it, but Josiah was praying, as wracked with doubt for his part in Ezra's dying as Chris, and no one was going to make it harder by saying the words - dying, death - aloud until they had to.
And anyway, whatever it was that he could see, like a sere shadow made of the night, it wasn't in the churchyard, but that didn't help Chris believe right now.
"You ain't him." He could almost convince himself of that, half-afraid, half-desperate to see the indistinct figure that might have been a man in a threadbare, ragged, blood-red coat and a low-brimmed hat that hid the face... "You ain't him. And you can't have him."
~777~
Somewhere, very dark and cold and quiet, he is trying to remember. But all he can think about are cards, spinning from his fingers into his hat on a hard wooden floor.
He had done that once, in a cell.
He's dimly, vaguely sure it isn't the same place, the same time, the same... anything. But still, even as they fall from his hands into the shadows, he is looking with his mind's eye for an ace of spades. Everything will be all right if he can find the ace of spades.
He has to tell... someone that the money... what money?... someone's money is with the ace of spades.
~777~