Jacob

"I say we burn the place do—"

"Silence," Jacob said smoothly, lifting his coffee for a sip and eyeing his assorted sheep across the rim. He had learned early that raised voices were rarely the path to respect. Better to be calm, quiet, and as smooth as oil.

Mulligan snapped his trap shut, eyes downcast.

Another trick Jacob had learned along the way was to let a sinner arrive at the conclusion of his own wrongdoing. Force a man's face too gruffly into the baptismal waters and he would sputter and drown. Stand back and let him submerge himself and watch a follower be born.

"Did God bless you with a keen intellect, Mr. Mulligan?" he asked, focusing on the man he had interrupted. Mulligan's face flared beet red with indignation before his gaze dropped and his jaw unclenched on a sigh.

"He did not," he said quietly.

"God blesses us all with the tasks He believes we can execute, does He not?"

"He does, sir."

"What is your task, Mr. Mulligan?"

"To obey, sir."

"And yours, Mr. Weston?"

The gruff young man with the three-week beard crawling down his neck and the mouth full of rotting teeth also averted his gaze, focusing on the glass of whiskey in his hands. "To obey, sir. I only think—"

"Your job is not to think," Jacob interrupted once more, shifting in his seat to cross one leg over the other and lean back. The voice in his head raged, but he closed his mind against the onslaught. Work meetings were not the time for the devil's antics. "Your job is not to obey."

Weston frowned and clenched his jaw and nodded.

"What happens when members of the flock veer off the course set by the shepherd, Mr. Weston?"

The man swallowed hard, Adam's apple bobbing beneath the thick black scruff that coated his neck. "They lead the flock astray, sir. To the wolves."

"Have you proven yourself worthy of the role of a shepherd?"

"No, sir."

Mulligan, idiot that he was, squared his shoulders and frowned, eager to defend his friend. "Sir, that wasn't his fault. She got in the way."

"Who pulled the trigger, Edward?" Jacob asked, turning the question to his most vocal, most loyal, and most problematic follower.

Mulligan sagged. "Pat did, sir."

"And when Patrick Weston pulled the trigger, who died?"

"The devil's concubine, sir."

"And who was supposed to die?"

Mulligan slumped fully, his broad shoulders rolling inward and his gaze dropping to his lap. "The devil's spawn, sir."

"And now we have a problem, don't we?"

"Yes, sir."

The roar of the devil's voice was deafening and Jacob took another sip of his coffee in an effort to quell the screaming. "Back to the matter at hand... these whores clearly won't listen to reason. They must be driven out by force."

"We can't use too much, though," Mulligan offered, rising a bit from the slump of his humiliation. Although he was merely stated that which they all knew. "Sheriff's willing to overlook a little bloodshed on the behalf of the righteous, but if we slaughter a whole passel of whores, someone's bound to squeal about it out of town and we'll have marshals on our tails."

"Not what we need," Jacob said mildly, and all six of the assorted men shook their heads hard.

"Not what we need," they echoed.

The cacophony in his head multiplied, drowning out the flesh and blood men who sat around him. 

I am Legion, for we are many.

The devil spoke in many voices. The sweet caressing intonation of a woman whose face he could not remember. The sharp barbs of a man whose face he remembered too well. Saccharine words played over the feel of rough, probing fingers.

Jacob told his parishioners that he was a conduit to the voice of God, but he knew better. He was the mouthpiece of the devil, and it was only by the strength of his own will that he was able to corrupt the dark messages before they escaped his tongue.

He thought of Katherine. That vile, sweet-faced bitch who had drawn him to temptation. She sang Satan's song in the voice of an angel. All the men told him that she was dead, but he knew better. He had tried to save her, but the claws of evil had long ago sunk deep into the tender flesh of her soul. She had run from him. She had turned her back on salvation.

And now it was her voice in his head that rang the loudest, screaming the devil's words.

"They are innocent!"

The thought of murder was a foul taste on the back of Jacob's tongue. So too had been the feel of his fist striking Katherine's fine-boned cheek. But he would not simper and cower away from the divine task foisted upon his shoulders. Weakness did not save souls.

"Reverend Peters?"

Mulligan's voice was a faint echo, lost behind the pressing roar of voices. Jacob sipped his coffee and returned his attention to the gathered men, all waiting eagerly for his direction.

"Yes, Mr. Mulligan?" he asked calmly.

The other man's eyebrows nudged up toward his thinning hair. "What are we gonna do, sir?"

He smiled slowly, allowing the tension in the room to build around him until even the voices were buried in the weight of expectation and excitement.

"It's simple, gentlemen," he said, letting his eyes flick over each face. Dirty, weak-willed men. Ragged, diseased sheep. His flock. "We're going to find my wife."

Mulligan frowned. "But sir—"

"She isn't dead," Jacob snapped, cutting off the overworn objection. "She is hiding."

"Reverend, we checked the whole saloon. She ain't there."

"Did I say she was hiding at the saloon, Mr. Mulligan?"

Natural ruddiness deepened to a red flush of humiliation on the man's face as he dropped his gaze. "No, sir."

"Then where is she?" Weston piped up, his voice taut with eager nerves.

"I have some theories," Jacob told him mildly. In truth, he had one theory. Even those who did not attend his church understood the strength of his flock, and only one family in this town would dare defy him. Jacob had seen the devil in Josh Tucker's eyes the first time he had laid eyes on the boy. He had hoped to save the family through Owen, but the draw of sin and the strength of his son's evil had drawn even that stalwart soul into the fire.

The people in this town were weak. Even Mulligan had voiced his doubts over the ranch owner's true evil.

"I've known Josh since we were boys," he'd said once, when Jacob had given him his first assignment against Owen Tucker's bastard. "He's good people."

Jacob may even have listened, if only the voices in his head hadn't agreed with the assessment. But they were clear. The voices liked Josh Tucker, and if the voices in his head liked the man, then he was not good people at all. He was evil incarnate—the exact kind of black-hearted sinner who might hide a man's wife right under his nose.

"Where do you want us to start looking?" Weston asked, jerking him back to the present-- the stifling fire and the cigar smoke and the scent of burnt coffee. Katherine had made excellent coffee. He missed that about her, even if he didn't miss the temptation of her soft body.

"You aren't going to be looking anywhere," he told the man with a carefully manufactured sneer, designed to bring him down to the chastised obedience of a proper sheep. "You need to visit the sheriff and make sure this mess you've created isn't going to bring the law down on our heads."

Weston went pale, nodding at his hands, and Jacob turned back to the group.

"Do any of you have any friends out at the Tucker ranch?"

Shaking heads, and only Mulligan spoke up. "Those cowboys of his are loyal to a fault, sir," he said apologetically. "Even when they come to town they keep mostly to themselves. And they've got that ranch outfitted like a fortress ever since the fire. Took on a few extra men from out east just to keep watch over the place. Rumor has it he hired a couple sharpshooters to sit up in the hills and guard the roads."

"I heard he's got scouts hiding in the trees off the road, all the way to town," said another.

"And a passel of natives living in the back acres. He pays 'em to scalp anyone who tries to enter the property from the west."

"And a whole pack of dogs staked around the house. I heard they're rabid."

"There's bars on all the windows, even in the barns."

"The new house is made of brick, did you know, sir? Don't catch fire."

"Enough," Jacob snapped. He believed very few of these silly rumors, but he wasn't so stupid as to think the Tucker Ranch would be easy to infiltrate. Which was all the more reason to believe that was where Katherine had run. "We don't have to set foot near the house."

"We don't?" Mulligan asked, frowning.

"No," Jacob said, smiling as the idea constructed itself in his head, a temporary wall against the voices. His timid little Katherine had gone to ground and there was only one way to root out a burrower. "We'll drive her out."

And when he drove her out of the safety of her burrow, he would snatch her up. Her and that little whelp she had used to corrupt his home. His wife. Not his child. And wasn't he the fool for allowing that ruse to continue? Isobel was as filthy as her mother-- a ragged mongrel disguised as an angel. He should have realized long ago that his seed would never have produced such a strong-willed little heathen.

Once he had them both, that rotten cur would come to him, dragged by a leash of lust and sin. Perhaps once he rid this town of Satan's influence, Katherine would return to him. Her brat was a lost cause-- corrupted since her conception. The voices wanted her, but the voices had only ever led him astray. 

Katherine, though? Perhaps Katherine could still be saved. With patience and a firm hand, he could rip the devil's claws from her soul and set her free. 

The grin on his face was too wide. Untempered. It pulled at his cheeks and made his jaw ache. He looked around at the six assorted faces and forced his expression to relax. These men would not benefit from exposure to the mania of his devotion. It was a private thing, his faith. In public, he had to remain calm. 

"Lyle," he said, jerking his chin at the bespectacled man sitting closest to the fire-- the only man in this ragtag group who could write with any proficiency. "Take notes for us. And everyone listen closely. We cannot afford another blunder like Mr. Weston's." 

Weston grimaced and fidgeted, but like all the men he leaned forward in his seat, eager to hear the plan. Blank eyes set into excited expressions.

Sheep. That's all they were. The voices in his head insisted they were more, but he was no fool. He knew their worth. He knew his own. He was a shepherd and they were sheep. Sheep he commanded against wolves. 

Like David fighting Goliath, he knew his odds. So did the wolves. It was why they so brazenly defied him.

But what the wolves didn't know? 

Reverend Jacob Peters had the devil in his ear and God at his back. 

He would not be defied any longer.

***

Short chapter! I'm sorry. It's been so long and it's just a baby chapter. 

Truth be told, this story has given me a lot of trouble (I say as if every story I've written hasn't given me trouble at some point). Literally not a single one of these characters have gone the way I've wanted them to go. I had actually constructed a plot! An honest-to-goodness plot! And now it's completely derailed. 

This chapter was already kind of a filler. I wasn't sure if I was going to publish it, but it occurred to me that I needed to at least try to get inside the villain's head if I had any hope of figuring out where this story is going. After I wrote it I figured why not publish it. 

Hopefully now I'll be able to shift back to a Sunday posting schedule. And in the meantime, thank you so much for your patience. 

Love!

Liz

***