Skin Trade Read online

  I broke down and fetched myself a small serving. And he was right. It was good. I was more hungry than I thought, and well in need of nourishment after so much trauma. The food fueled my body and mind, allowing me to regain some composure. It also fueled my curiosity. “Where did you get the vegetables?”

  “We grow them.”

  “You’re not a very good liar either.”

  “Not a lie. It’s the truth. Newton has a sister town about two miles south of here. A community about the same size, but focused on agriculture. We have another town to the north, one that concentrates on repairing and manufacturing equipment as opposed to … well … other business.”

  “You mean the business of manufacturing and training revenants?”

  He paused, fork hovering just at his mouth. “Aren’t you the observant one?”

  “So I’ve been led to believe.” I sipped at my wine with a wince. It wasn’t a very good year.

  “Let’s not talk about such things. It’s not good dinner conversation.”

  I agreed with a shrug, and we returned to eating in silence. I took a few mouthfuls, chewing hesitantly as I watched his motions. He confessed to a lack of refinement, and while he sounded educated in his speech, this roughness showed in his manners. Indeed, he displayed all the signs of someone trying very hard not to pounce on the table and stuff his face with both fists until he passed out from gorging. It made me wonder what held him back.

  “Why all of this?” I asked at length.

  “Why what?” he asked.

  “The candles. The suit. The forced manners.”

  “You’re surprised, aren’t you?”

  “To say the least.”

  “Good. I hoped you would be.”

  Was that the point? To put me off my guard by attacking me with etiquette? “I have to confess, this wasn’t what I expected from you.”

  “And what did you expect of me? That I would force you onto the bed, tear off your clothes and ravage you without so much as a hello?” He stopped to smirk, a dirty leer lingering in his eyes. “Or was that what you were hoping for? A rough turn in the sack before I pass out from exhaustion and you cut my throat while I sleep?”

  I tossed my fork to the table. “Don’t be crude.”

  “I see. My manners are forced, yet the idea of the opposite is also crude?” He shook his head and chuckled as he continued to eat. “Women. I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand them. But that is the burden of the male, yes?”

  All at once, my plans to win my freedom through manipulation fell apart. I seethed with anger at the whole affair, and here sat the rightful man to blame, laughing at his own cruelty. “What was I supposed to think? You dragged away my friend to feed him to your monsters and then kept me locked away in here for the better half of a day so I could be initiated into your personal collection of concubines.”

  Understanding touched his eyes. “Ah, I see. You’ve been speaking to Jessie.”

  “Damn right I have.” My tongue burned at the language, yet it came to me as easily as breathing. I suppose I had spent far too long in the company of men, being treated like one of them.

  “And what did she have to say?”

  “Unlike you, she was honest with me. She attempted to explain the way of things, but I’m afraid she was too embarrassed to put most of the depraved acts into words. But she said enough.”

  “Did she, now? And did she also explain how I set out a candlelight supper for my victims? How I serve them well-made food and drink, all before I ravish them with those unspeakable acts, of course.”

  I shook my head, unable to trust my voice to mask the tears on their way.

  “She didn’t, because I don’t.” He pushed away from the table and went to the window, surveying his empire with his hands clutched behind his back. “I admit I have, in the past, been a bit forward in my desires. You see, I wasn’t joking when I said I had no proper upbringing. I’m used to taking what I want, when I want it, from whomever I want. Without question. Yes, I have been guilty of putting my needs far before those of my guests. Female or otherwise.” He turned to face me before he added, “But not anymore. Not with you. Not like that.”

  “Not like that, is it? Then how is it supposed to be? You ply me with drink until my inhibitions are reduced and I crawl between the sheets, barely mindful of my actions? Or perhaps I should feel obligated? It that it? Maybe I’ll allow you to bed me because I feel I owe you after you showed me such generosity-”

  “I sought your company!” he said over me in a voice just this side of a shout. He took a deep breath, calming himself before he spoke once more. “Just the pleasure of your company.”

  “My company,” I echoed.

  “I know it’s hard to believe, considering the situation. But it’s true. I … it’s almost impossible to find good conversation out here. The kinds of women who make it this far into the Badlands are either boring wives following their criminally minded husbands or …” He turned away, leaving the point to dangle between us.

  “Or?”

  “Whores.”

  I was glad he had turned to the window, for I nearly spit out my wine at the word.

  “Out here, we see nothing but broken wives and spent whores.” He looked to me again, and thankfully I had recovered. “But not you. You are a breath of fresh air in my stale existence. You’re so different from anyone I’ve known out here. Here or back east.”

  “Is that so?” I asked, hoping the question would cover my amusement. Oh, Irony! What a cruel and troublesome master you are! I wanted nothing more in the world than to crush that arrogant smile of his with the truth of my experience. Of the years I spent all but tied to the bedpost of a variety of partners. But I held back. Again, that was my secret. My private shame.

  “Ever since I set eyes upon you,” he said, “I knew you were special. Everything about you is unique. I have never met a woman that compares with you, Samantha. May I call you Samantha?”

  “I don’t see how I can stop you,” I said. “You’re going to call me what you want anyway; it might as well be my name.”

  He clapped just like a little boy, amused by my rebuff. “You see? Another woman would’ve agreed just to please me. But not you. Everything about you enraptures me. I’m fascinated with the way you speak your mind, just as I’m felled by your simple beauty. Even under your male façade, I could see how glorious you were.” He paused to rake his cold eyes over me once more. “And I see that I was right, of course.”

  This brought me to a genuine blush. It had been a long while since a man claimed I was pretty, much less glorious.

  He must’ve seen my embarrassment, for he grinned ever wider. “Don’t act surprised. You must know how beautiful you are. I’m sure others have told you the same.”

  “Surely you’ve had prettier women in your bedchamber before me.”

  “While it’s true that I’ve had many lovers—some beautiful, most not—in all my experience, I’ve never found a mate that displays your qualities. In my maturity, I find I crave conversation as much as consummation, Samantha. I’ve built so much, yet I have no one to share it with. I need a partner in life, not just in the bedroom. I seek not just a spouse, but an equal. A companion, if you will.”

  The small hairs across my arms and the back of my neck stood on end, my hackles rising in warning against his choice of words. “And you think I am this companion you seek?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “But you don’t even know me.”

  “I know enough. I’ve seen you exercise your spirited will, been on the receiving end of your sharp tongue, heard high tales of your bravery.”

  “Bravery?”

  “Yes. I understand you stood up to Clinton when he had your master on his knees in the mud. No one, and I mean no one in all the Badlands has ever tried to tell him what to do. Aside from me. How could I not consider you my equal?” He stopped to chuckle once more. “Why, the very fact that you took up the mantle of a male just to
learn the skin trade under Theophilus speaks volumes about you.”

  He knew way more about me than I was comfortable with. I hoped these were all just conclusions he had drawn from his own clever observations, and not information he had leeched from an unwilling source. My thoughts drifted to my mentor and his safety. Despite everything that had happened, I still worried for him. And cared for him.

  “I never thought I would live to see the day,” Dillon said. “I never thought good old Theo Jackson would actually take on an apprentice. But how could he resist your charms? Such an innocent young woman, all alone, in the wilds of the Badlands?”

  His implication disgusted me.

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said.

  “It never is,” Dillon said. “Not with him. I merely meant that you must’ve reminded him of his family. He had a daughter your age when the uprising began. Did you know that?”

  “Of course I did.”

  Dillon whispered, “All this and smugness too? Where have you been all my life, young lady?” He rejoined me at the table and drained his glass with a grimace. “I imagine he told you all about her. Darlene was her name, I think.”

  I shrugged, because I had no idea. We didn’t get as far as names in our discussions.

  Dillon sensed my distance from the conversation. “I’ve spoiled the mood. I shouldn’t have brought him up. It pains you to speak of him.”

  “No it doesn’t,” I lied.

  “Of course it does. You trusted him, and he betrayed you.” After refilling his glass with wine, he swirled the contents as he watched me squirm. “We’re a lot alike, you know.”

  “We’re nothing alike.”

  “No, I meant Theophilus and me.”

  “Then that goes doubly so, because you’re nothing like him either.”

  “Nonsense. We have much in common. Surely you can’t tell me that you hadn’t noticed.” He lifted his brow and blinked a few times, as if to prove the point.

  “You have the same eyes.”

  “Very good. I was beginning to think you hadn’t-”

  “Why?”

  Dillon took on a look of genuine surprise. “Oh, this is unexpected! You mean you don’t know? He didn’t tell you?”

  “Well, of course I know … it’s just …”

  “No. You don’t.”

  I said nothing.

  “You trusted him with your very life,” Dillon said, “and yet he held back so much from you. It doesn’t surprise me. We wear the side effects of our mutual suffering so differently.”

  Now I was confused. “What mutual suffering? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about survival.”

  He could have written a twenty-stanza poem or an opera or a play in three acts, each describing in great and torrid detail exactly what he meant, and it wouldn’t have explained things any better than that simple, single word.

  Survival.

  “You survived the infection?” I asked, unable to disguise the awe in my voice.

  Dillon nodded.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” he said. “Sheer willpower? Divine intervention? Superior genes? I’ve asked myself that question over and over, and to this day, I don’t claim to understand why I pulled through while so many around me succumbed. All I know is that having suffered and survived has made me stronger. Both in mind and body. These eyes aren’t just unusual on the outside. I see things in sharper detail. In fact, all of my senses are heightened. I hear better than the average man, sense the smallest of movements through solid stone. I also find I can operate on far less sleep than everyone else requires.”

  “Everyone save Mr. Theo,” I reminded him. No wonder my mentor slept so little.

  “Theophilus is a fellow survivor, true,” he said. “But whether or not he is superior as a result all depends on how you look at it. He certainly doesn’t think so. I’m forced to agree.”

  “If you are stronger as a result of surviving, then so is Theophilus.”

  “I am stronger because I recognize my strength. I choose to act upon the experience of my tribulation. Theophilus hides his away. He loathes what he has become as a result of his ordeal.” Dillon raised his hand to his eyes. “He thinks of this as a mark of shame, while I … I consider it a sign of superiority. An advantage I use to its fullest extent.”

  “An advantage you use over not just the dead, but the living as well.”

  “Naturally. It’s my right as a survivor.” He stood again (Could he not be still for five minutes?) and paced the room, excited by his own speech. “Out here, men fear me because they know I’ve been to hell and back, and I survived to tell the tale. They fear me because I understand the revenant—how it works, how it thinks, how it feeds—because I was so close to becoming one. And these same men obey me because they know I can smell that fear upon them. They deny it, but I can see it in their eyes. I can hear it in their quickened hearts. They follow my orders because they are afraid of me. Of what I might do next. If I am capable of surviving the infection, what else I can accomplish? Back home, I was nothing, a flea on the ass of an irritated hound. But here? Out here, I am a god among men. And rightfully so.”

  “If survival makes one so great, then why would Mr. Theo hide it? Why deny godhood if it’s his to claim?”

  “Because he is ashamed. The infection took his whole family, yet he lived. It torments him that he should endure while his family suffered. He takes his anger out on the very source of his rage. I suppose you could say he seeks atonement through sacrifice. His or the undead’s, I could never be sure.”

  “He sees the act of destroying the undead as penance, while you see their employment as a privilege.”

  “You could say that. Yet there is very little difference in what we do. I reap benefit from their lives, as it were, while Theo reaps benefit from their deaths. We are both using the revenants to fulfill our needs. Just in different ways. As I said, we are a lot alike.”

  Through the cold lens of logic, I could easily see how the two men appeared to be working as one. Except Mr. Theo didn’t use the threat of the revenants to control people. Nor did he create new revenants to use as he saw fit. But I held my tongue, because I sensed a chance to get closer to Dillon in this discussion. Whether genuine or faked, a woman’s interest in a man’s work always set him at ease.

  “Then you do create them?” I asked. “Revenants, I mean. You make your own?”

  “Yes,” Dillon said. “I find it a necessary evil. Thanks to our mutual friend and his development of the skin trade, there aren’t nearly as many undead as there used to be. In fact, I dare say that in a few short years, the west will become inhabitable again, something I have no intention of letting happen. I refuse to build an empire just to have those bureaucratic jackasses back east take it away from me.”

  A necessary evil. In those words, I saw a flash of Pete tied to the stake, writhing in his last moments of agony. Did Dillon consider the slaughter of those boys a necessary evil as well? I also wondered what he would make of the knowledge that those same bureaucratic jackasses were the ones who created the virus in the first place. It would probably please him to learn it. That was, if he didn’t already know.

  I tamped down my contempt and continued to work him with soothing words. “It must be hard to build an empire when others work at cross purposes to you.”

  “It’s a hard row to hoe, to be sure,” he said. “But I find that the threat of joining those in the stockyard has an immeasurable effect on discipline.”

  “I can imagine. Do you really plan on making Clinton into one of those things?”

  “Certainly. I sent him to escort Theophilus to my town so we could negotiate an end to our feud. Not to beat the man within an inch of his life. So, off to the stockyards with our wayward Clint, teach him and everyone else a lesson. And of course, you can’t make empty promises. You must see things through, or others will doubt your word.”

  I swallowed hard, unsure I could for
m the words I needed. “It’s something I’d like to see.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “The stockyard?”

  I nodded as I nibbled on a crust of bread.

  “You want to see the stockyard?” he asked again.

  “Of course,” I assured him. “If I’m to be your companion, then I will need to understand how your life works. How you work. Since the stockyard is the center of your empire, what better place to get acquainted with you?” I smiled as pleasantly as I could, considering the situation.

  Dillon said nothing for almost a full minute. He just sat completely still, narrowing his frozen eyes at me as he considered my sudden interest. I carried on with my meal, though it was hard to choke down a single bite as my stomach roiled with lies and deceit. For a moment, I thought he would see through my ruse, call my bluff and throw me to his dogs. Or worse, the revenants. I needed to reinforce the idea that my interest was genuine, and not just a way to get close enough to him so I could stab him in the back when the time was right.

  “How embarrassing,” I said. “It seems you’ve caught me in a bit of a lie.”

  He crossed his arms, waiting for me to come clean, but saying nothing.

  “It’s not the stockyard alone that I’m interested in,” I said. “It’s your man, Clint.”

  “What of him?” Dillon asked.

  “I want to watch him change. I want to see him suffer. The way he made Theophilus suffer. Mr. Theo might have betrayed my trust, but he didn’t deserve such brutality.”

  Dillon shifted in his seat, nonplussed by my confession. It wasn’t enough. The suffering of my mentor moved him not. I needed something closer to home. Perhaps the abuse of his property would melt his resolve?

  “Fine,” I said. “You force it out of me. I didn’t want to say this but, he …” I lowered my eyes, feigning timidity. “He put his hands on me. He touched me.” I raised my eyes to his again. “Though groped is a better word for what he did.”

  “Did he?” Dillon asked, a rasping growl in his voice.

  I bit my lip and nodded. A fine performance if there ever was one!