"Dang it, gonna be late again," Marcus grumbled, running a hand through mussed hair. Dust particles danced in the soft sunlight streaming in through curtained windows, dancing around him as he pulled on his overalls.

Vanessa sighed. "Just a little longer?"

"Want somebody to get suspicious?" he asked over his shoulder, searching for his boots on the floor of her little house. "We've been at this for weeks, it's a wonder no one's figured us out. Good thing Moira's so self-absorbed, she might smell you on me."

Scowling, Vanessa lay back against pillows. She'd never understand why people wasted time in commitments that sapped their lives slowly away.

"I asked you not to let me fall asleep."

She shrugged. It was more fun than she'd thought, to have sex with someone (that she remembered), but it was just as good to have someone to sleep beside afterward.

"I'll come to see you."

"No, you won't." He wasn't arguing, he was telling her. "This was good when it lasted. I have kids. I have a wife. You know that."

"Yes, but we can be discreet, like we did here-"

"Vanessa, I have to go. I love you. I will always love you in my dreams." Kissing her softly, he gripped her hands and let them go, not turning back to look at her as he walked briskly away.

Surely that wasn't the end, she thought.

He loves me.

He'll come back.

OXO

Marcus never came back. The cold, hard truth of it didn't hurt as badly as with Langston, perhaps because Marcus left without hating her. It seemed almost a learning experience, she decided, one that left her with a greater understanding of happiness. It gave her a reason to smile to people, to joke with children to make them laugh through their checkups, to think that life was not simply an endless game of who will use who next.

Finally, Vanessa could stay in Haven no longer, and it came time to move on. People thought her incredibly odd already, and it was best not to let them see the growing contrast between their aging bodies and her timeless form any longer than they'd already had.

She stayed on long enough to see her successor trained and to take over the clinic. That took long enough, several years, and so before her 20th anniversary working in Haven she was off.

For a while, she took a break from medicine. In Greendale, she tried her hand at weaving. In Dryden, cooking. At each new town – each safe town – she stayed a month or a year or whatever she fancied, each time eyes open. She stared down and studied each person around her with interest and fear, all at once. Settling upon a place or a business with someone honest enough to be safe around, she would take up some trade or other. Pretending to be stupid, to be docile, she survived well enough. If being herself was so dangerous, she would simply become someone else, someone far less interesting, make mistakes on purpose and use small words.

And she knew when it was time to move on. If a customer or passerby or any sort of grown man looked too long, too often, she made note, and that was her cue to leave the town.

Trouble was, the world around her changed over time, and on Gunsmoke things always changed for the worse.

Tales of desert pirates, ferocious criminals, the just-as-strange bounty hunters out to nab them, stories of towns diminished by disease, poverty, particularly nasty sandstorms...these were things a person would overhear every day. Not all was to be believed, but most was. Vanessa hadn't noticed that the frequency and severity of casualties and horrors in the stories had increased some over time, but when word came to Bridesdale one windy day that Cirra'd been leveled, she was shocked into that realization.

"Dogs and chickens. Babies. Everybody. Sliced up. Like...oh, God...like sandwich meat."

Vanessa halted where she stood, turning to the crowd outside the tiny Bridesdale sheriff's station. Stepping slowly past a few tall fellows, she craned to be sure she heard that right.

The people around her were pale. A few shook their heads. "Bullshit."

"My brother saw it with his own eyes, sir, and it is God's honest truth," insisted Mitchell, the town's runner. He spoke up to be heard over the increasing number of upset citizens he was attracting. "Cirra always was so isolated, the way they were, nobody found nothing till what my brother says is a few days after it happened. But the evidence showed it. Everyone and everything, the buildings, solid stone buildings and metal tubes thick as a man's waist, cut in such a way...And all those people..."

In her peripheral view, Vanessa saw a few of the men and women cross themselves superstitiously. She made haste to copy the motion.

A hush fell and someone let a soft whimper as Mitchell held out an object in his palm. There was a third of a brick there, rough with mortar and the ravages of the weather upon its sides, splattered with paint – no, not paint - crimson, a horrible crimson red. And one side was cut, smooth as glass, catching the light as though it were polished metal.

Beside her, a large woman choked on a sob. The man in front of her shuddered.

Vanessa felt chills. What could do this? What weapon, what tool? How many men, if men, because surely nothing but a man could...

"Demon"

"God protect us"

"Curse"

"The devil himself"

Muttered, then agreed, then shouted, these words repeated, and the group was nodding, shaking their heads, wringing fists against their chests. The energy became red hot. Vanessa had to step back, out of the fray. Touching the hair over her 'demonic' ears, she felt faint.

Shuffling directly to the tiny room she was renting from the town tailor, she grabbed her traveling gear and hastened her exit from the town. She didn't speak to a soul on her way out. Each sandy footstep let her breathe a little easier. Her mind raced, heart pounding. What could do that to a town, she had no clue. The technology didn't exist. But the more she thought on it, the more she felt that it didn't really matter who did it, or what did it. Or why. Hell, she had seen the darker side of people, and those people may have deserved it. Fact was, it happened, and without an easy, rational explanation for such a horrific thing, regular folk would think how folk tended to think. That if they didn't know the answer to something, it must be God or the devil or some such agent of one or the other.

Vanessa didn't want to be beaten to cries of 'demon!' ever again. Because if she were, the next time, she figured, she wouldn't be as likely to live through it. Not anymore.

She tried to keep to the wilderness as much as she could, after Cirra and a couple more subsequent "Demon Blade" massacres threw the people of Gunsmoke into an angry, fearful, religious fervor.

Trouble was, traveling in the desert wasn't as lonely as it used to be. In earlier days, the population of the planet was small and spread out. As they concentrated and established new towns, utilizing plants more and more, allowing mankind to lengthen life spans and lower infant mortality some, there naturally was more commerce and travel. Occasionally Vanessa would spot someone traveling by toma or vehicle on the horizon. She would hit the sand, letting her pale cloak camouflage her against the sand, listening, panting, waiting for the sound of those travelers to dissipate. If an ill-meaning person or group came upon her, if they had a gun, if they used it before within range of her 'abilities' with the book, then what?

She kept her book ready in her holster. At each town, suspicious eyes followed her. Everyone was out to scam the traveler and no one wanted to trust the stranger. One day, Vanessa almost bought a large crucifix to hang outside her cloak, as maybe that would alleviate some of the fears, but she was quickly running out of funds. She needed money because she needed food. Yet she needed to be away from people because she needed to be safe from harm. This was quite a conundrum.

Luckily, Vanessa was a clever thing. A bolt of fine cloth, mass of thread, and a few weeks in the wilderness later, she had the answer. The best defense, she'd heard somewhere before, is a good offense.