Sorry for the double-posting, guys.  Especially with this huge post.<br/><br/>I hope it's, at least, entertaining *s*<br/><br/><strong>CATCHING HELL, part ii</strong><br/>A Story of Katie Sinclair<br/><br/>The fury's been in me for many years.  Some times it's like a burning  in me, a seething at the edges of me like I was a tinder taken to fire, not all consumed at once but with a glow at the edges.  Properly provoked, a breeze stokes those coals from a dull glow to a blazing orange heat, and I can't help but consume whatever fuel's in my way.  It seemed that every time I flew into a rage, I incinerated some part of myself in the process, charring and consuming my insides and leaving nothing but a husk when the rage had passed.<br/><br/>After a rage, my heart always felt like brittle, papery ash, hollowed and dead and fragile.  I hated that emptiness, like even my pain-- the things done to me as a child, the unjust, evil things I had to watch done in the world-- it had nothing to dampen it, nothing to distract from it.  I would fold in on myself, time and space becoming a tiny cocoon, and I would wait to die, like I might bleed out inside my body from this hole where my heart should be.  But I lived each time, just enough time to find more fuel for that fire.<br/><br/>That kind of rage stays at bay, now.  When I changed, I learned to tap it, to feed it at will and not be swallowed by it.  And I learned to use it for what it was meant for: revenge.<br/><br/>SPIRITUS SANCTI, TEXAS.  21 DAYS AGO.<br/><br/><i>Kicking up a dust-devil on my route to the township, I tore up huge chunks of clay and scrub grass, with my hat-cord drawn tight under my chin.  The gelding I rode was frothing, his hooves pounding like the steady rumble of a great machine, and I bore down on the speckled horizon, the black flourishes of trees on skinny hairline trunks, the striations of trees and outbuildings approaching and receding into periphery.  The sky was growing pregnant with rain as the midday heat eased away, and the horizon was all steel and iron in thick bands, making the whitewashed houses and stores into stark teeth on the darkening earth.  The brown stubs of sheds whirled by, and I passed the picketed silence of the cemetery, the lonely, hollow spearhead of a church steeple.<br/><br/>The furnace in my heart was hissing and groaning with the stretching heat, and a surge of fury made my fingers clutch at the reigns, filling my mouth with acid and bristling my hair into quills.  <br/><br/>Their faces would not leave my mind-- charred, blackened with the fire, melted like wax here and papery black there, small and weak alongside the strong who had labored their lives for their families.  Those who sacrificed all, those who bled and wept together, finally, in that final clutch of fear as their prized daughters were plucked from them, those whose faces were now black smears in a perpetual sigh of resignation, or were charred to screaming skulls who could only stare eyelessly from the simmering, spitting pitch fires.  Those who had lived and could not beg for justice for they had no mouth, for they had no tongues, for they had no breath left to scream.<br/><br/>Thus I made for the town square with the certainty and destructive force of a bullet, and I would not stop until the speed and mass of my rage had found a home.  As it turns out, that destination was the office of the sheriff on main street.  <br/><br/>Dismounting the horse, I was at a tare when my boot took the pine door, its resin-stained surface splintering and buckling at the force of it.  The wood-burned placard reading 'Sheriff Jim Pendergrast' bounced across the shorn plank floor and skittered to a halt at the clawed foot of the room's predominant feature-- a broad oak desk.  I am not a particularly strong woman, but I am a determined one, and doors frequently obstruct me from my prey though I seldom find it necessary to destroy them.  The sheriff's office was a cigar-reeking chamber with cheap wooden chairs, the broad claw-footed desk, and a hanging oil lamp with a flower-etched shade of frosted glass.  The walls were unfinished board, nailed with tatterred and yellowed prints and etchings of faces, figures, and ordinance notices that fluttered in the wind of the coming storm and the force of my unbidden entry.<br/><br/>As one might expect I had been in the offices of law enforcement officers before.  I supposed that from the size, if this was like the offices to which I'd had the privilege of acquainting myself in the New Mexico Territory, then the detainees would be housed in a dugout somewhere off-premises with a rough door and bushels of chain to spare.  Larger towns had courthouses with whole cells for prisoners, and some Marshalls and Sherriffs had respectable bars like a lion cage in their office.  Since detaining prisoners typically requires courage, I expect that the local interment site saw little use.<br/><br/>Sherriff Pendergrast himself was not present, unless he was the harelipped young man with a tin badge before me.  The young man jumped to his feet so fast that his chair clattered to the planks behind him with a solid crack, and the bawdy-book he was flipping through landed like a wounded bird some feet away.  He gaped, his eyes bugging wildly and his mouth fumbling for words-- the impression made him look like a fish gasping on dockside.  I had landed afoot at a dead stop, my ostrich-skin boots more than my shoulder's width apart, my duster cast off my holster-bearing hip where my hand waited like a hovering viper.<br/><br/>"The Sheriff, please."  I said sweetly.  Mama always taught me that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.<br/><br/>The young man's look went from the sheer blanch of fear to a reddening of humiliation, and he tried to muster rage and indignance.  His voice broke as he overstretched his voice and tried to pull the revolver from his hip.  "WHO THE F-"<br/><br/>I had snatched the revolver from his holster and hefted it in my hand like a shopkeeper presenting her wares.  He choked on the words as he saw himself disarmed, but I could tell he wanted more to beg than curse when I whipped it, overhanded, at his face.  I knew that a pistol-whipping was not a merciful alternative to shooting, though less lethal.   I stopped the gun before his thick nose, however, letting it hover before his eyes as blinked in surprise.  The gun rattled in my hand-- cheaply made, its parts fitting together and functioning, but not reliably so-- as I ejected the cylinder.  Five primer-caps and five paper tubes of gunpowder spilled onto the floor with a soft hiss before I tossed the gun, which shattered the warped frame of a tintype over the desk before both crashed to the floor.  <br/><br/>"You keep the first chamber empty."  My nose was an inch from his nose, my eyepatch an inch from his eye.  He was mutually horrified and surprised at the proximity of a girl to him... there was that change in his eye as he went from scared to a kind of excited, demonstrating that uniquely male sort of hope that defies logic when there's pussy involved.  "That's smart.  So it don't go off and blow your foot away."  He swallowed, the prominent Adam's apple rising and falling a half a foot on his long, skinny neck.  I removed my pistol from its holster-- the weight of it is so familiar, so well-balanced after the cheap weapon I'd just removed from the youth.  "The Sheriff.  Where." I held the gun by my thigh, feeling its eagerness like the goddess herself grinning at me with that predatory, beautiful smile.<br/><br/>He swallowed again and looked me over, and stupidly his mind tried to grasp control over the situation.  The sound of my pistol-- the hammer ratcheting back, the certain 'cli-click'  of the cylinder lining up for a blast-- and his bravado turned back to water.  That, combined with the look I returned to him, finalized the desired impression in his mind-- that I would kill him for fucking sport if I had to wait one more second.<br/><br/>"Th-- the Double Iron."  I'd seen the place.  Cheap-looking saloon.  "He's b-been there since the men come through..."<br/><br/>I turned away from him and went through the open frame of the door.  "Best start running," I said.<br/><br/>"Wh-what?"  On the porch, I turned on my heel and crouched, aiming my pistol up through the doorframe.  He stepped back, trying to form pleas with his lips but found no voice.  Until he saw what I was aiming at-- just above the pile of powder on the floor...<br/><br/>"JESUS FUCK--" and he took off at a run for the back of the office, hopefully in the direction of an exit, just as I fired once.  <br/><br/>Knowing that my horse was gun-broken would have been an advantage, but I was beyond such forethoughts... my shot snapped the facets of the hanging lantern above the desk, sending it crashing to the floor with a hearty splash of oil and the shattering of the hooded glass.  I stepped clear of the doorway as the powder went up, sending a burst of splintering wood and smoke, and the room was spattered with burning oil in an orange blossom of fire.<br/><br/>The horse turned out to be gunbroken after all, thank the lady, but he still bucked at the fire and the smoke, so I snatched his reins and hauled him away as I holstered my pistol.  "One more call to make."  The wind was whipping now, and my had left my head where my black hair was pinned in a bun.  The storm was coming as surely as the sun was setting, and the twilight-violet of the street was soon drenched in a wash of bright amber that cast stark shadows, starker by the moment as the Sheriff's tinderbox of an office was taken by that hungry flame.  My own shadow danced madly in the flickering orange glow as I led my horse up the street towards the Double Iron.</i><br/><br/>NEW ORLEANS, CONTI STREET.<br/><br/>The white-eyed man rests his hand on the muzzle of my horse and I watch him, my eyes half-lidded eyes and downcast from where I sit the saddle, as he takes the reigns from me.  I grip the horn with a black-gloved hand and swing my left leg up and over the saddle.  I find the solid masonry beneath my boots disconcerting, just as I found the broad expanses of streets and buildings stifling and disorienting.<br/><br/>Everything is too close in this city.  Everyone is right there on you.  I can see through lace curtains across the way where a man is shaving his face.  I can hear cats mating in their yowling, agonized fury from at least three streets away.  I can hear the bedsprings squeaking from a loft down the road, I can hear glasses clinking at a bar three blocks up.  I feel the rumble of another passing wagon that grinds the fine grit of the street beneath steel-hooped wheels.  I can tolerate the deluge of information, and I can handle myself well enough in a city, but it's an uncomfortable sensation.<br/><br/>Somehow, the well-dressed black man mollifies this concern with a casual confidence.  I realize, standing before him without the aid of a horse, that he's probably no less than seven feet in height.  "I'll watch over tha horse, miss, and your things here."  That accent of his is soothing too... something like the Southern I have myself, mixed with the French my mother used to read books aloud in, of which I never understood a word.  "Don't worry, miss.  Go inside, have some supper.  The gentleman is waiting."<br/>The doors are narrow, side by side with a dark surface lacquered to a fine glossy sheen.  They are inset with a pair of ovular windows, each end pointed with an iron inlay and crisscrossed with fine laces of lead.  With the reigns in his hand, the man with white eyes opens these doors and stands aside for me to enter.<br/><br/>I follow his indications removing my had and, by habit, carrying it at my right hip where my holster rested patiently.  The foyer that greets me features a high ceiling where the walls taper to opposing balconies for the upstairs.  This open foyer fashion is reminiscent of a plantation manor I once visited, but on a much smaller scale as if to emphasize the crowded opulence of a wealthy city.  All the room glows with the subtle orange of a light that is not oil or gas fueled, but spills from a chandelier suspended directly overhead in a cascade of crystal-refracted light. My boots echo on the tiles of the floor, which are made of smoothly ground black stone and fine white marble.  There are doors on either side of me, and I can see a stairwell up ahead that rounds the corner to the upstairs, and across from its first step is the only open door I can see.  That must be where I am expected, though so many closed doors stir the hackles on my neck.<br/><br/>The doors close with a soft click that rattles their glass lightly, and I cross that immaculate floor with steady steps, all the while trying to ascertain the presence of any others nearby. What is there I more feel than hear, for the home seems to be rife with presence and company that can't be seen.  I am starting to grow used to noticing that kind of presence, and though it unsettles me, it is as much a part of the ambiance in any old city as the smell of the river is to this one.<br/><br/>The clinking of glassware and china from that open door puts me somewhat more at ease, as does the wafting smell of cooking that, I notice, immediately brings water to my mouth.  I've eaten nothing but jerky and corn mush for a few days.<br/><br/>I fill up the doorframe an inch at a time.  A candelabra lights the table despite the suffuse glow that permeates the room, glinting off of silver trays and painted china.  A man at the head of the table stands to meet me, and for a moment I'm stuck where I am, unable to breathe.<br/><br/>His smile, so warm and easy and calm.  He's older than I by what looks to be nearly ten years, with skin the color of creamed tea and eyes like the steely smoke of a cannon.  Broad shoulders, concave cheeks, a broad chest like the hull of a boat under red silk vest, the crisp ivory shirt beneath open by two buttons.  His hands are long and slender, protruding from white cuffs that sport a pair of mother-of-pearl links.  Slavery's at an end, but he strikes me as a man who could never have truly been in servitude.<br/><br/>In his eyes, I must be akin to a groundhog.  My dusty coat, my worn men's pants and cracked leather vest over a shirt yellowed and thinned with wear-- my hair a tangled pleat at the base of my head and my eyepatch marring what could be a very pretty face.  So I'm a bit shocked when he reaches for my hand, his long fingers taking my own and giving me a gentlemanly handshake.  "Kathryn Sinclair," he says in a silky bass, and I want him to say it again immediately.  "You are as striking as your reputation."<br/><br/>I almost blush at the compliment. The eeriness of the situation-- the sheer magnitude of my attraction, which is flipping my heart against my ribs and sending a warm rush through my lower belly like a spring thaw-- becomes an object of despise in me, and I swallow and lick my lips before I speak with all the steadiness I can muster.  "You have me there, Sir.  I don't recall having made your acquaintance."<br/><br/>He releases my hand and gestures for the seat opposite him at the white-clothed table.  "Baptiste DuMonde.  Please sit, Ms. Sinclair.  Have some supper, please."  He sits first, and sets about opening a green-glassed bottle of wine labeled with words that I take to be French.  "I know you have a long night ahead, and I won't keep you from your business.  But I want you to be prepared first."<br/><br/>Baptiste effortlessly pours from the bottle into two long-stemmed crystal glasses, and he doesn't lift his smokey eyes as I stare him down, but I do join him at that table, though I feel a twinge of regret when my dusty jeans find the goldenrod cushion, as if my presence might permanently sully this place.  I reset my hat on the empty tablecloth at my right, and shift my hips cautiously so that my holster rests in the nook of the chair, ready to be taken at a moment's notice.  "Prepared for what, precisely?"<br/><br/>Finishing the pour, he places the glass before me and takes a sip of his own-- as if to reassure me, silently, that it's not poison.  "I know you're here for Flinchum," he says in that lovely, brassy way of his.  There's no menace, no chastising.  No hint that this is, at all, an inconsiderate act.  "But I want to discuss a couple of things with you first, so that you don't go into that mess ill-prepared."<br/><br/>"You know him?"  I ask, and I know I must sound incredulous.  "And you don't have any objection?"<br/><br/>Smiling that warm smile, he opened a rollback silver tray, producing a cloud of steam.  "We have red beans, rice, lamb,"  the aroma spurs my stomach to a fierce demand, "and creme brulee.  The finest on this continent, I believe."  He studies my response, doesn't belittle me by explaining precisely what that is.  "I think you will enjoy it, Miss Sinclair.  And, as I said, you must have much to do, so... unless you object I'll explain while we dine."  With that, he forks a slab of lamb onto the finest china plate I've ever seen.<br/><br/>What transpires then is like a staredown.  He sees through my eyepatch, of that I'm sure, for he locks eyes with whatever it is in me that can hunt men and dodge bullets and see across miles and miles.  I see something akin to it in him, but can't put my finger on it.  He knows I know, and that I do this as much of choice as he does to invite me within his home.<br/><br/>I take a long, slow sip of the wine, and it's the finest I've tasted.  I have little knowledge of wines, but I know that it rolls on my tongue like sweet smoke and honey, full and beautiful like how life should be.  I swallow the wine, and we begin the meal, and Baptiste begins to talk.<br/><br/><br/>SPIRITUS SANCTI, TEXAS. 21 DAYS PRIOR<br/><br/><i>There was a commotion from within the Double Iron saloon as I approached.  Though it had nothing to do with me, I would not have slowed even so.  In the horizon behind me, the young deputy was feebly trying to fill buckets from the hand pump out back of the Sheriff's office, which was by now an orange torch on the burnished violet skyline.  The screaming inside the saloon was a young woman wailing and crying, a round of laughter and a round of curses and arguments.  The reek of liquor was nauseating even before I opened the spring-hooked door to the saloon, which creaked with the rage of a maddened bird.<br/><br/>Riotous laughter stopped with the abrupt collision of a herd rushing headling to stop dead at a fence.  One or two voices lingered on, the owners to drunk to notice me.  One heavily drunk bastard even let fly a wolf-whistle of the type one might use at a bawdy-show.  Cigar smoke was thick enough to ripple with the breeze of the coming storm outside, and I let the door slam itself shut behind me.<br/><br/>In a moment, I'd ascertained every face in the room, including the clamorously screaming young woman who, despite the crying wails before, had quite the gaudy smile on her heavily painted face that rapidly melted into a scowl at having lost the room's rapt attention.  The Double Iron saloon featured a table for playing English Billiards by the window on my left, and one of the players there steadied himself on a pool cue and leaned in within a foot of my face.  "You lost there, Nancy?  Need yourself a bed to stay i-hII--" and his voice broke off as I swept his drunken feet from beneath him, sending him sprawling face-first into the broad wooden gunwales of the table where his teeth-- what remained in his hoary face prior to our encounter-- managed to break his fall before he reached the floor.  The blood that spurted was immediate and profound, and the sound sickening enough that a general hiss and grunt of shock resounded from the cheap seats.<br/><br/>A pimp-looking little rat of a man from the nearest corner drew down on my immediate flank.  Something about his eagerness made me think that this wasn't his first time shooting someone in the back, and he relished the notion and opportunity.  Simultaneously, another barn-broad man with a full white beard and confederate cavalry jacket-- yes, I remember them well-- was the first to step forward from the mahogany bar on the far wall next to what might have been a faro table.  This one bore only his beer and a fist in aggression toward me, so I opted to give him a chance to prove his chivalry.  I snaked one arm over the pimp's and wrenched my opposing hand under his wrist, snaring his gun-hand in a vice before he could take aim.  I saw clearly in that briefest of moment that his hammer was back-- he would fire wildly in hopes of grazing me, burning me, or deafening me.  I wouldn't let him, of course, but I thought it best not to waste the opportunity.<br/><br/>The bearded cavalry-- god, what horse could have borne that rotund bastard?-- bore down on me and I spotted my target-- a glint of bright, broad metal at his waist-- a massive buckle.  I lowered the snaggly youth's arm for him and let him discharge the round-- the gorilla from the bar hunkered over and keeled back with the force of the slug, gripping at his lower belly with the horror that he may have just caught a gut wound or, worse yet, become a eunuch.  <br/><br/>At this point, I utilized the snarl of a lad's weight to toss him to the floor, his pistol in my hand long enough for me to bury the butt between his eyes.  An inch lower and I could have killed him easily with the weapon, but as it was he'd, at best, have a permanent squint.<br/><br/>The fury was boiling up inside me, fed-- not sated-- by the bloodshed, until I bore down my gaze upon the Sheriff.  His brown eyes were almost black, his hair like crow's down all salt and peppre at his temples.  His nose was too large for his face, as if it'd been broken many times and reset.  I typically find this trait endearing, but in Sheriff Pendergrast I found it revolting.  "You," I said, and watched as the whites of his eyes became visible fully around the ebon irises.<br/><br/>"What do you wa--"<br/><br/>I crossed the floor and the trollop who'd been fawning and mewing for attention a moment earlier sprung to her feet.  She was overmade, but not ugly, though her outfit was little more than undergarments in the gaudiest of greens I'd ever seen.  "You can't just--"  I spun her aside with a shuffling of my feet and twist of my hands at the whalebone corset on her waist, and suddenly she faced the poker tables.  I gave her a little shove and she sprawled, her heeled shoes struggling to maintain footing for her laudinum-soaked brain.  <br/><br/>"You the law," I said to Pendergrast.  No other guns had come out, mostly because they were terrified, but partly because I hadn't yet skinned my .45.  "Ain't you?"  I knew the answer.  I'd pegged him-- a combination of the pinholes in his jacket where the badge would sit, the blurry tintype I'd destroyed on his office wall earlier, and the snotty bearing of his waxed beard and mustache.<br/><br/>He chewed on air for a few beats, then coughed as if he'd forgotten how to breathe.  "Madam, you have me confused for--"<br/><br/>Standing before him now, my head came merely to his chin.  As I've said, I am not an imposing figure in size, but I have a knack for finding cowardice.  "You ain't the Sheriff then?"  I asked in a shrill, accusatory hiss.  Everyone heard, and a few grumbles of disapproval followed this gutless charade.<br/><br/>One more man said, "naw, he's the badge here," though I didn't care to seek him out.  <br/><br/>"Well, Sheriff, there's been a whole shitload of murders in your town."  I bored my gaze through his skull and tried not to pull my pistol to kneecap him down to the ground, where he belonged.  "Was you awares?"<br/><br/>Sweat beaded.  Probably half of it pure alcohol, from the look of him.  "C'mon, we got some investigating to do--" <br/><br/>"What do you want from me, eh?  What's your game, you little... freak!"  The liquor must have kicked in a notch, because he'd gone cleanly from amnesia to divine warriorhood before my eyes.  "I will have no accusations from a godless little cretin-- WHORE-- from off the plains, who never set foot in my town afore--"<br/><br/>The hackamore I used to hobble my horse at night was tucked neatly into my coat until that moment, when I whipped it out and over the Sheriff's head.  Naturally there was some commotion at this, and before I had tipped his balance-- not so easy as one might think, because though he was clumsy with drink he was also fortified by it-- and he was surely fumbling for his firearm that-- to be sure, I had checked-- he apparently left in his now incinerated office.  <br/><br/>With a clamorour howl, the crowd tried to converge on me, but my pistol was in my hand before they could reach me.  One shot over my head was all that was required-- the earlier report of the ambushing sharp's colt pistol was like a firecracker by comparison.  I cannot explain to you why this is, except that perhaps each bullet from my Lady's gun is imbued with a little of the piss and vinegar I feel when I fire it.  Plaster rained from the ceiling as my bullet struck the chimney on the roof and shattered one of the bricks to dust.  The crowd milled backwards in shock, and I drug my quarry out into the square.  <br/><br/>"I think somebody's gonna hang for this, lawman."  He was kicking and cursing with choked breath as I drug him from the warped planks of the porch into the dust of the street by the rope I'd hooked under his chin.  The night was still lit by my handiwork up the street, and I made for the closest thing to a gallows I could find-- the church's steeple.  <br/><br/>Voices ran together in a torrent of cursings and musings and oaths, but I ignored them, mostly.  One voice, though, raised above the rest when they beheld the suffuse glow of wind-whipped fire in the night.  "Is that the Sheriff's office?"<br/><br/>Lightning chased rings around the town from seven miles out like great white vultures moving in.<br/></i>