Without a Shadow, page 26
Without a shadow of a doubt, this book would not have been possible without my amazing publisher: CamCat! Thank you in particular to Sue Arroyo for making that call and the whole team for getting behind my story. The draft I sent was certainly not the finished product, so I thank my stars that you could all see its potential.
Of course a book has to have beta readers, and I was incredibly lucky with the ones I had. Thank you to Oisin Herron—the writing journey is always better with a friend, and I look forward to more drafting, scraping, and swapping in the future. To E. M. Leander (author of Wren and the Tarnished Tiger): it was such a joy to read your work; thank you for all your comments. Thank you also to Suzan Phoenix (writer of sci-fi/fantasy); your perspective was very helpful, and I’m truly amazed by your creativity and the love and fun you put into your characters. To Nori Shoreline (author of The Steam Witch): thank you for beta reading the messiest of drafts and encouraging me despite the chaos on the page! My thanks as well to Lizzy McIlwaine from White Willow Editing: your comments were almost too accurate and really helped me move on to the next stage. Honestly, all of your stories were so cool and motivating to read. Thank you so much for being kind to this story in those early stages.
To my friends and family, who cheered me on with the edits, gave me feedback when I needed it, and in general have been so supportive: thank you to Anne, Christina, Csenge, Ellie, Graham, Jayne, Jessie, Laura, Natalie, Pippa, Rachael, and Simreen. I always feel like I get honest advice from you guys, and so much love.
Last—but not least!—my thanks to you, the reader. Thank you for delving into this world. Every book has a bit of magic in the pages, but it’s the reader who can wield it into something far beyond the author’s imagination. I hope Without a Shadow inspires you to create your own kind of magic, in whatever form it takes.
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DUST SPELLS
ANDREA LYNN
Stella would have thought the sky was a harbinger of the apocalypse if her world hadn’t already ended. The early-morning light was sickly yellow and filthy as always.. The clear blue skies and lush green fields of five years ago seemed a dream. It was hard to imagine her home had ever been anything but diseased and covered in dust, though she knew it had. She knew a lot of things she didn’t want to know, like how the entire world could be upended overnight, forever changing not only her life but also the lives of millions—and none of them had the power to change it back again, not ever.
She pulled her family’s Chevrolet pickup into Jane’s driveway and put it in park. When she cut the ignition, the engine sighed as if as tired as she was.
Don’t you die on me now, she thought. You’re the last luxury we have.
A harsh, discordant clanging met her ears when she stepped outside. Jane’s neighbor, a widow named Mrs. Woodrow, had an ungodly number of wind chimes on her already cluttered porch. Stella cursed her silently as she hurried up Jane’s drive. Why have even one wind chime in a place where the grimy, choking wind never let up? Where dust storms called black blizzards rose up and blotted out the sky, raining debris on cars and buildings, tearing through the cracks in the most well sealed homes, and mutilating the Great Plains as thoroughly as they had mutilated Stella’s life forever?
Stella opened Jane’s back door and let herself in. She closed it behind her, muting the chimes, but then heard the equally irritating sound of a baby’s cry.
“Morning, Stella,” Jane called, rushing into the kitchen with Jasper in her arms. She sat down at the table and opened her blouse, baring her right breast. “Sorry. I meant to feed him before you got here, but he wasn’t hungry.”
“Not a problem,” Stella replied, grateful no writhing parasite depended on her for its sustenance. She had too many people dependent on her as it was. “Is everything ready?”
“Yes,” Jane said as Jasper found her nipple and quieted. “I filled the jars last night.”
Grateful that part was already done, Stella turned and crept down the rickety stairs to Jane’s basement. When she passed the large copper still, she fought the urge to blow it a kiss.
When Jane’s parents died, they left her two blessings: a house with a paid-off mortgage and her father’s old moonshine still. President Roosevelt had repealed prohibition the previous year, but that didn’t matter in Kansas, which had been dry since the last century, and Stella—who almost never prayed—prayed it would stay that way. With liquor outlawed, she and Jane could make fifty cents a pint.
The idea had been Stella’s. Though Jane was four years older, the two of them had been friends since childhood. Jane married right out of high school, but her dirtbag husband abandoned her and Jasper after losing his job last winter. Jane made ends meet by taking in laundry, and when Stella remembered Jane’s father’s old still, she suggested they go into business. Jane brewed the moonshine, and Stella delivered it, hidden among the freshly washed sheets and towels.
Her heart thumped as she crouched down and picked up the crate. Sixteen beautiful jars. She held the equivalent of eight dollars in her hands. After three months, she and Jane had twelve consistent clients. And the demand was growing. Their only competition was the local drug store, where the owner sold malt whiskey smuggled in from Colorado, but most people couldn’t afford it. Jane’s moonshine wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t so expensive it would break the average person’s budget. If they had a bigger still, or more people to help, Stella knew they could make their little sideline a real business.
But they didn’t. And Stella knew enough to be grateful for what she did have. She started up the stairs, holding the crate that would bring her the only thing in the world that was hers alone. The thing that, once a week, brought her closer to her dreams.
Jane had finished feeding Jasper by the time Stella was done loading the crate and laundry into her truck. When she walked back inside, Jane was burping him over her shoulder.
“Do you ever want to murder Mrs. Woodrow?” Stella asked, closing the door behind her.
Jane laughed. “I hardly notice those wind chimes anymore.”
“How? They’re maddening.”
“She thinks they ward off evil spirits.”
“They’re about to ward off my sanity.”
Jane laughed again, and Stella wiped her brow.
“How are you on ingredients?”
“I have plenty of corn and yeast, but I’m running low on sugar.”
“I’ll pick some up.”
She smoothed her hair and checked to make sure the patches she’d sewn beneath the worn spots on her dress were well concealed. “How do I look?”
Jane smiled, her dimples showing. “Like a sweet eighteen-year-old girl.”
“Wash your mouth out with soap. There is nothing sweet about me.”
The last thing Stella wanted to be was sweet. Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow weren’t sweet. They were vixens wrapped in diamonds and furs who consumed men like champagne. Jane was a sweet girl.
Sweet girls ended up alone with a baby.
“But sweet girls aren’t bootleggers,” Jane countered. “They’ll never suspect.”
“True,” Stella agreed. “I’ll be back with some sweet, sweet dough.”
The sun had barely risen, but the inside of the truck already felt like an oven by the time Stella reached her first stop. She dabbed at her forehead with a handkerchief and checked her lipstick in the rear view. Just because she lived in a dusty prairie town didn’t mean she had to look like it. The money she would earn today could buy powder, blush, mascara, and maybe even a new dress, but it was going straight into her Folger’s can in the attic, so lipstick alone had to do. The crimson stain was perfect, so she stepped out of the truck.
Her first client was a man named Lewis Johnston, who lived with his mother and preferred to take his deliveries at work. Stella always made his stop first, because he worked at the train station, and the train-hopping bums who loitered around the place were mostly asleep in the morning. They camped in the hobo “jungle” in the nearby woods, and some of them liked to whistle and yell at the women who walked by.
That morning, the coast seemed clear as Stella clipped up the drive to the station, holding Lewis’s shirts, with the mason jar between the folds. But then she heard shouts, and two men tumbled out from between the trees. The first one fell onto his back, and the second leaped on top of him and punched him square in the face. Stella shrieked and jumped back. With a savage groan, the first man shoved the other man off and scrambled to his feet. Then, he gripped the man’s shoulder and swung his fist deep into his stomach. The man doubled over, and the first seized his head and drove it down into his knee. Blood burst from his nose and splattered the pavement as well as the man’s pants. He crumpled to the ground, and the other man spat on him.
“You bastards always make the same mistake,” he sneered. “You go for the face.”
“What’s going on here?”
Both men looked in Stella’s direction. She blinked and spun around. A police officer was jogging up the drive. She heard a scuffle and turned back around to see both men bolting toward the trees, the first moving like lightning and the second stumbling and clutching his stomach.
“That’s right, get out of here,” the cop yelled, and Stella turned back to face him. He nodded and tipped his hat. “You okay, miss?”
Stella stared at him, suddenly very aware of the mason jar in her arms. “Oh, yes. They didn’t hurt me. They were fighting with each other.”
“Dirty bums,” the cop grumbled. “Why can’t they kill each other out in that jungle, away from decent folks?”
Stella nodded and started back toward the station.
“What’s a young lady like you doing here so early anyway?”
She stopped. After closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, she turned back around.
“I’m delivering laundry. To a man who works at the station.”
The cop stepped closer, glancing down at the shirts. “He doesn’t want it delivered to his house?”
He looked back up, but before he met her gaze, his eyes lingered a few other places. Her crimson lips, her dark curls, the swell of her breasts beneath her dress.
Men.
“I guess not,” Stella said with a laugh. She stepped closer, glad she’d taken the time to dab on a bit of her dwindling reserve of perfume. “You men can be so silly sometimes. I never know what you’re thinking.”
He smiled sheepishly and blushed. “I suppose we can be. Well, go ahead. I’ll make sure no more of these hobos get in your way.”
“Thank you so much,” Stella said, flashing a smile. Then she turned and walked up the drive, thinking Jean Harlow couldn’t have done any better.
Over the next hour, Stella made the rest of her deliveries. Not all were for moonshine; some were just laundry. When she finished, however, she cursed herself. She needed to get more sugar for Jane, but the general store was all the way back by the train station. She should have gotten it after her first delivery. Now she would have to go all the way back and risk arriving home late, running behind on her chores, and disappointing her Aunt Elsa.
She sped to the store, went in, and used two of the of the eight dollars she’d made to buy twenty pounds of sugar. Then, she hoisted the two ten-pound sacks over each of her shoulders and trudged out into the heat.
“That’s a mighty amount of sugar.”
She turned around and stifled a gasp. The man who’d beaten up and spat on the other man at the train station was leaning against the wall. He was more of a boy than a man, she now saw, just a year or two older than she was. His lower lip had been split by the blow he’d taken to the face, and he was picking small chunks from a stale loaf of bread, eating carefully. There was a bakery next door, and Stella guessed the loaf had been thrown out with last night’s trash. Her stomach turned, and she flopped the sacks onto the bed of her truck.
“What’s it to you?”
“Just wondering if you might have the same amount of yeast and corn somewhere.”
She froze, and then spun back to face him. He read the guilty look on her face and grinned.
“That’s what I thought.”
She stared at him. Besides the split lip, he had a yellowing bruise beneath one eye and a scar through his other eyebrow. His skin and clothes were filthy, and his hair was a rumpled mess beneath his flat cap. Her gaze slid down to the knee of his pants, stained with the other man’s blood. He followed her gaze, popped a piece of bread in his mouth, and looked back up.
“Don’t worry,” he said as he chewed. “I’d never hit a woman. You could come at me with a knife, and I’d just let you stab me, sugar.”
She flushed, determined not to let him know she’d been afraid. “How thoughtful. If you’ll excuse me.”
“Hold on.” He stood up from the wall and stepped into the sunlight. “I’m interested in becoming a customer.”
He had a backwoods Southern accent. Maybe Texas or Oklahoma. Some desolate, nothing place even dustier than Kansas.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on, now. No girl in worn-out out heels is gonna spend that much money on sugar unless she expects some kind of return. And I watched you work that lawman this morning. Saw the fear on your face when he looked at those shirts. Saw the way you turned on the charm to fool him. Pretty impressive.”
Stella’s lips parted. Even the man who’d sold her the sugar hadn’t questioned why she’d bought it. He was just happy to make the sale. This boy talked like a hick, but he was smart. She studied his face. It was pleasant. Beneath the dirt and scars anyway.
But then she remembered his rude remark about her shoes.
“You couldn’t afford it.”
She purposefully raked her eyes over his filthy clothes as she said it. But his grin only curled, and he stepped closer.
“Ain’t you heard, sugar? We got a depression on. People trade and barter for things all the time.”
“Stop calling me that. And you have nothing I want.”
He placed another chunk of bread in his mouth and looked her over. “We’ve only just met.” He lifted his gaze. “You don’t know what I got to offer.”
She flushed again. “You’re disgusting.”
“Disgusting?” He cocked his head to the side. “My, what dirty thoughts you’ve got in that pretty head of yours.”
Feeling a sudden kinship with the man who’d punched him in the face, she spat, “Don’t flatter yourself,” and turned away, tossing her curls.
“I see those patches in your skirt, sugar,” he called. “Don’t pretend you’re better than me.”
“At least I’ve taken a bath this century.”
She didn’t look back when she said it, but she caught sight of his face when she opened the door to the truck. His smile was gone. Guilt rose in her throat, but she swallowed it, got in her truck, and drove away.
She sped toward Jane’s house, now certain she would be facing Aunt Elsa’s wrath when she arrived home. There were six dollars in her pocket, three of which were hers, but she found herself too shaken to enjoy their comforting presence.
Because the boy had been right. Her family was barely hanging on by a thread, and though they weren’t sleeping in hobo jungles and fishing stale bread out of the garbage, that could change at any moment.
Nothing was certain. No one was safe.
H. J. Reynolds, Without a Shadow
