My Calamity Jane Read online

  “Hello?” Jane called ahead.

  No one answered.

  “I really have to go,” Jane muttered, and Annie felt a pang of sympathy for the other girl. She was alone (or so she thought), in the dark, and this was a really bad time to have to relieve oneself. (Is there ever a good time? Not really. There are only inconvenient times.)

  Shoes scraped the concrete as Jane paced, glancing around until her eyes landed on a bucket. “Aha!” she said, but then, from the basement steps, a hulking figure emerged behind her.

  The garou was fast. With a terrifying growl, it tackled Jane to the ground before Annie could either call out or shoot it. And now, there was nothing to shoot, because the garou and Jane had rolled behind a vat and out of Annie’s line of sight.

  “Drat,” she swore, and scrambled for the stairway, whipping her gun from its place around her chest.

  Partway to the stairs, her toe caught on something, and she staggered forward a few steps before looking back. The garou. The one she’d shot. It was still there, while down below, the growling and scuffling intensified.

  Which meant that there were two garou.

  Two.

  Annie ran down the stairs, loading her gun as she went, but it really was much darker down here and she was going to be too late to help Jane unless she did something now.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she found a large red button attached to the machines. The label—barely readable in the shadows—read “ON.”

  Annie slammed her palm against the button, and immediately a metallic clanging filled the room and the vat began to heat. A sour stench rolled through, like warm animal fat.

  “Grr!” cried the garou, and a moment later, heavy (but human) footsteps ran away from the beast—toward Annie and the stairwell.

  Annie ducked out of sight as Jane threw herself up the stairs—thook thook thook—and back onto the second floor.

  Heart pounding, Annie hefted her rifle and crept around the heating vat.

  The machinery clanked and clattered, and the stink of tallow filled the factory, but Annie kept her footfalls quiet as she moved through the gloom.

  A low growl was her only warning: the garou ran toward her. Annie swung her gun around as the beast brushed past. She sneezed and reeled back, gripping her gun like her life depended on it (it probably did), but the garou didn’t go up the stairs after Jane. Instead, an exterior door opened, and dim light fell across the garou as it ran out, away from the banging machinery and Annie and her gun.

  Was it . . . running away?

  Well, maybe it had heard what Annie had done to the garou upstairs. It should be afraid.

  It surely wouldn’t be long before Mr. Hickok, Mr. Utter, and Mr. McCall came to investigate the noise of the machinery, so Annie was about to sit on a crate and wait in the shadows when something above caught her eye.

  Jane was moving, creeping toward an open window. But that wasn’t the alarming part. No, behind Jane, a garou—the one Annie had killed—was sitting up and shaking its head like it was waking up from the most confusing nap.

  Wait, the one Annie had killed? That garou shouldn’t be sitting up at all!

  And worse yet, as the wolf shook his head, fur drifted down to the bottom floor. Annie couldn’t see it, but her nose sure knew about it. Tiny wolf hairs tickled her nostrils and—

  “ACHOOO!” Annie sneezed so hard her eyeballs hurt.

  “Bless you!” Jane said from above, because some things were drilled into a person, and she literally could not stop herself even when silence was important.

  Annie rubbed her nose and looked up to see the garou swing around to look at Jane.

  Jane let out a yelp and scrambled down one of the catwalks stretching over a vat, but it was too late. The (not-so) dead garou lurched to its feet and lumbered after her.

  Quickly, Jane ducked beneath a control pedestal, hiding, but the garou stomped across the second floor and turned down the catwalk, moving straight toward her. The metal swayed beneath its weight, and even over the noise of the machines, Annie could hear it huffing and puffing—closing in on Calamity Jane.

  “Well, drat,” Annie muttered. How dare that garou come back to life? She lifted her gun, but there wasn’t a good angle. “Drat,” she swore again.

  The garou clomped closer and closer to the control pedestal where Jane was hiding.

  Annie did the only thing she could think to do: she whistled.

  It was a good, loud whistle, one that pierced even through the banging of the machinery. The garou’s head swiveled in Annie’s direction, and—wasting no time—Jane kicked out with both feet, knocking the beast back just far enough that it lost its balance on the platform.

  With a roar, the garou fell backward, and since there were no rails for safety, it dropped directly into the bubbling vat below.

  Annie blew out a long breath as she slumped against a crate. Both wolves were gone and—how about this—she’d saved the day.

  SEVEN

  Jane

  “You’re under arrest,” said Bill to the wax-covered man in the vat. The garou had almost instantly reverted into his human form upon coming into contact with the hot tallow, which was a good thing, Jane thought, on account of all that hair. The wax had been hot enough to bind him, but not really burn him, which was also lucky.

  “Jane!” Frank panted, running up to her and grabbing her by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I will have you know that I have single-handedly captured this here garou.” A great feat of derring-do if she’d ever heard it. Minus the hiding and the cowering, but those details didn’t matter. What was important was that she—Jane, not Bill or Frank or Charlie—had saved the day.

  “Well done, Jane,” said Bill, and she beamed.

  “How about the other guy?” she asked Frank. “The one in the top hat?”

  Frank sighed. “I couldn’t catch him.”

  Jane turned to the man in wax. “Where’s your friend?”

  “He’s not my friend,” said the man.

  “Where’s Mr. Badd?” she yelled.

  “I’m Mr. Badd!” he yelled back.

  “You’re Mr. Badd. Well, then who was the man in the top hat?” she asked, but Mr. Badd refused to say.

  “What about the Alpha?” Bill asked. “What can you tell us about him?”

  Mr. Badd laughed. “You’ll never find the Alpha. Never.”

  Jane was getting awful tired of these cagey garou minions.

  “Where’s Charlie?” Frank asked. “And Jack McCall?”

  “Charlie and I got separated from Jack McCall,” said Bill. “Then later a huge pile of pipes came down on us. I was able to spring back, but Charlie got caught in it. He’s hurt pretty bad—busted his leg and some ribs, and he’s probably concussed, but I think he’ll pull through. I got him outside and flagged down someone to fetch a doctor.”

  “Poor Charlie!” exclaimed Jane.

  “Mr. Badd, if you’d be so kind as to give us the key to the cage downstairs,” Bill said to the man in the wax. “It will go better for you at this point if you cooperate.”

  “It’s around my neck,” said Mr. Badd. “But I can’t move my arms.”

  Bill retrieved the key. Then he left Frank to wait with Mr. Badd for the police to arrive and went with Jane back down to the basement, where they unlocked the cage.

  “As I’m sure you’re aware,” Bill said, before they let the prisoners go free. “You folks have all been bitten by a garou, which means that you will become one yourselves. You must be thinking, ‘Now what?’” He laid a hand gently on the shoulder of the boy with the bushy eyebrows. “I’m here to tell you, your life can still go on, almost as usual, as long as you’re willing to follow a few rules.”

  Jane leaned against the wall. This was a speech she’d heard Bill give many times before. She called it: “SO YOU’RE A WEREWOLF—NOW WHAT?”

  A man in back raised his hand. He was missing his trigger finger. “T
here are rules to being a garou?”

  Bill nodded solemnly. “Well, these are more like guidelines. It’s not illegal to be a garou. You can’t help that. But there are some restrictions that come with it, the first being, Don’t bite anybody. Makes sense, right? If you bite someone, enough to draw blood, you will infect that person, and they, too, will become a garou. That is illegal. So watch your mouth.”

  “What about the full moon?” asked the boy with the eyebrows. “Is that when we’ll change?”

  “Yes. That’s rule two, in fact. Beware the moon,” Bill affirmed. “I think it best if you lock yourself up during that time, to be safe, and remember that the moon is full three consecutive nights every month, not just one night. But that’s not the only time you can turn, which brings me to rule three: Be mindful of your temper. If you lose your cool, you could change and do something you regret. Any strong emotion—but fear and anger, mostly—can bring the wolf to the surface. It’s best to go off by yourself for a while. Don’t spend time around people until you get the wolfy side under control. And that’s the last rule: Protect the people you love.”

  The group appeared to take this all pretty well. Maybe it seemed better than the cage and the uncertain future they had faced before they’d been rescued.

  Jack McCall came loping up. He was out of breath, and his clothes were a bit raggedy, as if he’d been in a tussle himself.

  “What happened to you?” Jane asked.

  He smiled through his panting. “I got lost, is all. I have a terrible sense of direction. And then I got, well, scared. Sorry.”

  Jane had a feeling that Jack McCall wasn’t being completely honest about being a seasoned garou hunter. But who was she to judge? She nodded. “It’s all right.”

  “What’d I miss?” he asked.

  Later, still with twenty-seven minutes to go before the Wild West show, Jane sat down at the bar across the street from the Coliseum Theater and allowed herself to take a breath. She’d finally found a bathroom, thank the Lord. Charlie was with the doctor, who’d said that he was going to be fine, eventually, but out of commission for a while. Frank and Bill had gone back to the hotel to gussy up before the show. But Jane just wanted to sit. It had been some day, and her entire body was hurting. Getting through the show would be a chore.

  She rubbed at a particularly sore spot on her left arm. Then she frowned and rolled the sleeve of her shirt up to the elbow. What she saw there should have shocked her, but she felt oddly numb as she gazed down at it.

  A bite.

  She could see the exact outlines of the garou’s teeth. It didn’t actually look that bad, considering what it was, but it was scabbing. Which meant the garou had drawn blood.

  When did it happen? she wondered dazedly. It must have been when the garou jumped her from behind. She hadn’t felt it then, but that was the only time she’d been close enough to get bit.

  She rolled her sleeve back down and gestured to the barkeep.

  “I’ll have a whiskey,” she murmured when he came over.

  He put the glass in front of her and filled it with the amber liquid.

  (Your narrators here. We’d like to pause to admit that, yes, we’re talking about a seventeen-year-old drinking whiskey, but this wasn’t strange or—cough—illegal for the time. People back then drank alcohol because bottled water didn’t exist yet, and the only available water was likely to be contaminated with things you don’t even want to know about. Jane herself had been drinking for pretty much as far back as she could remember. She’d decided a long time ago not to let whiskey get its hooks into her the way it did with some—cough, her parents—but tonight was turning out to be a drink-it-up sort of night.)

  Jane lifted her glass and drank the whiskey all in a gulp, the firewater burning a trail from her throat to her stomach. She gasped and nodded at the barkeep. “Make that two.”

  EIGHT

  Frank

  “Jane,” Frank called. “Jane!”

  Jane ignored him. She was sitting at the bar turning an empty shot glass over and over in her hand. He didn’t know how many shots she’d had. Frank frowned. Jane liked to boast that she could drink any man under the table, but the thing was, Frank had rarely seen her drunk. It was another one of the rules of their gang: no drinking before a show or during a garou hunt. They had to stay sharp.

  “Jane,” he said. “You know we have a show, right?”

  She kept on contemplating her glass.

  “Jane!” Frank said again, loudly.

  She spun to glare at him. “What? What’s so all-fired important that you have to keep yelling ‘Jane! Jane!’ at me? I can hear perfectly well, can’t I?”

  “Remember the show?” Frank asked. “Across the street? In ten minutes?”

  She blinked a few times, then sighed. “Yeah, ’course I remember. I’m coming.”

  “Good.” He watched her closely as she got up from the barstool and grabbed her hat. She wasn’t drunk—maybe a little tipsy, was all. He held out his arm, and Jane took it. Her body was tight as a bowstring, and she was even trembling. Preshow jitters? But that wasn’t like Jane either.

  Something else was troubling her.

  “Charlie’s going to be all right, you know,” Frank said, patting her hand.

  “That’s what people always say,” she replied mournfully. “They say, ‘Things will be all right, you’ll see.’ But then they’re not.”

  “It’s only a broken leg,” Frank said. “He really is going to be fine.”

  “I know,” she grumbled.

  “Do you want coffee? Or a barrel of water?” he asked, thinking both the coffee and a dunking would do her good.

  “I want a barrel of coffee,” Jane said.

  “I’ll get you one.”

  “Nah,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “So you want coffee, but you don’t want coffee. Help me keep up here.”

  She pushed out the door. “What does it even matter anymore?”

  “What do you mean?” Frank asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be Calamity Jane, not Melancholy Jane?”

  “I’m thinking about changing my name. That has a ring. Hey.” Jane nodded at the line of people wrapped around the building. “Is that for us?”

  “It’s a sold-out performance,” Frank said with a grin.

  “Good.” Jane swallowed hard. “That’s real good, Frank. You must be over the moon.”

  “Getting there.” He hurried the both of them to the back entrance—away from all the people in line to buy tickets. George met them at the door, tongue flopping out the side of his mouth as he looked up at Frank and Jane.

  Is Jane hurt? George whined. She smells scared. George, for all his dislike of females, was very protective of Jane.

  Frank shrugged—better to answer silently when other people were around—and followed his dog as he led them to the backstage area.

  “Are you sure you’ve got this?” he asked Jane.

  Jane wiped a hand across her nose. “I was born to got this.”

  Wild Bill opened the show. Frank’s father was the epitome of a showman, as always: tall and weathered-looking, with a neatly trimmed mustache and long, tidy curls. When he drew the ivory-handled pistols, the audience cheered so loud it made Frank’s ears ring. Of course, Bill didn’t shoot those pistols, on account of his failing vision and not wanting any unfortunate accidents, but he did regale the audience with the enthralling tale of a particular garou hunt.

  “Way back when, I found myself tracking a small pack of rogue garou. They’d been tearing through the country and leaving a trail of bodies behind them.”

  The crowd booed.

  Bill nodded understandingly. “Well, I tracked them all the way to a cabin.”

  Frank rolled the cabin set onto the stage, then vanished behind the curtains for the next part.

  “It was said to have been occupied by a good pioneer family—a ma and pa and two strapping young sons—but by the time I arrived, the whole family w
as dead. I was too late.”

  “Horrible garou!” one man shouted.

  Bill pulled his hat low, giving the family a beat of silence. Frank swallowed down the lump in his throat. That part was always hard to hear.

  “Well, I knew what I had to do. I readied my weapons”—Bill drew his pistols and bent his knees—“and crept up on the cabin. I was hoping to catch them unawares, but they’d picked up a friend on the road. I’d thought there were four—and I saw four shapes moving inside the cabin—but there was a fifth standing watch.”

  Frank lowered the paper garou down into the makeshift tree. Everyone in the audience gasped.

  Bill pulled himself straight up and squeezed a trigger. “Bang!” he shouted (because the guns weren’t loaded), and Frank made the paper garou flutter to the floor. Half the audience jumped in their seats.

  “I shot it, and the garou went down, but the noise alerted the others to my presence. All at once, I was surrounded.”

  Frank worked the pulleys until four more paper garou descended, and on the far side of the stage, Jane started growling. Frank growled, too.

  The crowd collectively gasped, and a child shouted, “Watch out, Wild Bill!”

  Bill held his guns out to his sides, bent in a ready position, and slowly turned a circle as the paper garou menaced him. “This was it,” Bill said, his voice low and ominous. “Outnumbered four to one. I knew I was done for.”

  Several audience members shifted in their seats, and worried mutters rippled through to the back of the theater. Frank smiled, even as he kept up his part of the growling.

  “But then,” Bill said, and a hush fell across the room, “we all heard the sound.”

  Nothing happened—the theater was quiet.

  Frank looked at George. “Come on, boy,” he whispered.

  Sorry, George thought. I like this story.

  Everyone waited, and Bill looked like he was thinking about repeating the line.

  “George, now,” Frank hissed.

  George whined, loud enough for everyone to hear, but it didn’t sound quite like a normal dog whine. No, it sounded like a baby crying.