((With thanks to the talented, wonderful writer of Glenn Douglas for his collaboration and competition))

The Penny Moon is a quiet collection of odd sights and sounds at any hour, but this evening it seems ghostly still and quiet. Perhaps all the usual patrons, residents and vagabonds who frequent the place are all driven inward by the oncoming chill of Autumn, but no matter the reason, Glenn is glad for it. He sits outside at a table with a beer in his hand that?s being kept cool by breeze that sweeps over him, rustling his shirt and making the stiff but old brim of his stolen hat flap. He watches the darkness of the world with half-lidded eyes and it looks like he?s well on his way to sleep, but every rustle of sound stirs him awake. A cigarette hangs from his mouth with a trail of ash and smoke curling up all twisted in the wind. He inhales like the little fire inside will sweep down into his belly and warm him from the inside out.

He comes strolling up with a twinkle in his eye and drops himself down into the chair opposite where he slouches down and stares at Glenn from under the sun-bleached dark blonde of his hair and then nods after a few moments as he scratches at the whiskers on his jaw.

?You know?? he begins, an elbow to the chair arm, fingers twisting a cigarette back and forth. ?There?s wanted posters for you out there, still. The artist had far too much poetic license if you ask me. What did she ever see in you??

Eli Donaldson cracks a white-tooth smile and then slowly draws the cigarette between the clamp of those teeth and lights up courtesy of a match from the pocket of the heavy brown leather around his arms and shakes the flame free when he?s done with it.

?Rye tell you much?? He peered at Glenn with his mica-gleam eyes as he turned the cigarette around, filter outwards, stared at the embering in his hand. ?Or not much at all?? Then he turned the smoke around again and slipped it between his lips for another drag, eyes squinting at the veil that rises on an exhale.

?Same shit I reckon she saw in you,? Glenn never looks up at Eli when he comes around to join him. The cigarette hanging from his lips comes up as they tighten around it and draw in some smoke to fill his otherwise empty lungs. He exhales and then replaces that smoke with beer.

?You know that Madison Rye,? he says. ?All cryptic bullshit until you sit and make her talk straight, but you can only get her to do that every once in a while. She told me who you was, who you are, and why you got a dog in this fight and that?s all I really care to know.?

The blonde cowboy laughs at it all, but not at Glenn himself. ?Say you?re right. On all accounts, which makes me want to like you some. If only because it?s her.?

Then he gets to laughing about Madison being opaque. ?Woman is like stone sometimes, ain?t she. But that in a woman ain?t all bad. If you?re a dead man.?

The last, he has to bark with laughter at, because both of them knew it well. What it was to be dead, and for Glenn, it had been real, where for Eli, it had been a different kind. The soulsick kind. Distance and isolation. He took another suck of the cigarette and spared a look at the sky. After a while of tired man silence, he comments in an offhanded way. ?More?n dog fight, snake boy.?

?That?s givin? him too much credit, callin? him a snake,? he finishes his beer and grabs a second one that?s standing next to a few more waiting bottles and twists the cap off. He flicks his cigarette out into the night and it?s caught by the wind and sent tumbling away in a scattering of ash and little smoldering sparks. It dies somewhere out there in the cold darkness, just like he had once upon a time.

?She?s got a habit of roundin? up dead men, I?ll say,? he muses thoughtfully. ?Funny, how that works out. Wonder what?ll happen to the next??

Then he looks at Eli, cool blue eyes for mica grey-blue.

?One fakes it, one really does die, maybe the next one will just stay the fuck dead. If he knows what?s good for him, anyhow.?

?No man knows what is good for him. We?re all too dumb until the last second when it all hits and we say to ourselves ?...aw yeah.? His voice growing airy there at the end as remarks on it all and then takes another drag, taking to watching Glenn like he?s a specimen or a creature he?s sure is more snake than dog, more dog than man.

?Ain?t much credit can be spared a reptile. ?Cept a boot heel. Or a bullet.?

He exhales ghosts. Looks to the sky again and smiles dimly. ?If there is a next. You heard the news??

Eli smoothed a hand back through his hair, slicked back earlier but falling apart with the day. ?Can?t say I?m surprised. Woman is strange and difficult. But I?m takin? to feelin? a sadness about it. You meet the husband??

He laughed into the collar of his shirt then and sat up a little in the chair. ?Madison Fucking Rye. Tell me you how two met exactly. I?d be interested to know.?

"She was a pretty little thing. Tutorin' kids at this town school. Used to get around in these white cotton dresses that the breeze got stuck in, so she'd walking along fighting against the dress and the breeze and those legs."

He shook his head as he issued a long, low whistle. "Didn't say nothin' to the pretty girl for a time. I wasn't in town much so why bother gettin' caught up with someone when you're not around, yeah? But one day she was walkin' along. All.. all windblown. One of them dresses. I'm starin' and she gives me a look. That brow thing she does? The one you know you're in some kind of trouble but perplexin' you with what have you done. And I said "just gimme a name, that's all I want" and she laughed at me and ignored me and that went on for a week 'bout and then finally I got it out of her. But I liked to get her kind of crazy, so I called her Sally. And then..." he closed his eyes and lifted his shoulders beneath the layer of jacket, shirt and tee and then shook his head.

"Never thought her and I would be here, tellin' you that. Or that I'd be here with one of the great loves of her life who ain't me. But here we are."

He chuckled.

"Annie?" A leap of the ridge of his brow. He dismissed the moniker with a tick of his tongue.

He looked off in the direction that he flicked his cigarette. "A rose is a rose don't quite work in her case. Her name conjures too many goddamn things." He wanted to hoist himself off that chair and leave in that moment, there was some part of him that got angry at the cruel turn of the past. But he lingered and he fixed his shining eyes on the outlaw.

"So, this Deep West bullshit. What's the plan you got exactly, Douglas. Fill us in."

The cowboy listens like he's been listening all night to the talk and he's listening to what isn't being said. He smiles occasionally and he's meaning it too and sometimes he's challenged or challenging but he wears it all like he can afford to. Even though Elijah didn't die a physical death, he feels like he's had a second chance at life nevertheless, so he's listening hard as he's watching. He doesn't want to miss a single thing. He knows he is lucky to be there. Easily, too easily, the choice he could have made hangs behind him.

Steeple of fingers and over them he talks as sits himself up stairs and sticks one leg out, bringing the other in as he nods to an offered beer, takes one into his paw of a hand and holds it there.

"No, I don't know no Maida. Rye and I speak as much as she speaks to most, like you say. Hard to get her to sit down and ... you know. Straight up as she is, most of it is locked up tight and there's plenty I don't know what to make a thing or two about, what to put together or why. So tell me about this Maida and why it is you makin' it out in your mind like you are. Ortiz is a crafty son of a bitch and he ain't easy to be puttin' in the earth, that be true from what I hear and why I once left. But we're here now and I want to know as much as you want to tell me and then I'm goin' to ask for more. I got a past with the man, Douglas. I might be able to connect some details together with you. But start with this. She a kid, young adult?"

Eli clasped his hands under his beard and his eyes shone with a light of interest and awareness as he stared at Glenn Douglas.

"Hold on, hold on." Eli goes to take a sip and drags the bottle back to his knee. "Go back a bit. You sayin' the girl died and ... ain't dead, just like you? And your brother is back too? Ortiz some kind of.. whatsamacallit? Necro-file? Neophiliac? That what they call them ones? The ones that raise the dead? That is what they call em right?"

He rubs at his chin, the susurration of skin and broom-handle coarse hair at his jaw. "Yeah, so, I figure.. wait. You had... you had yourself some kind of sickness. You had the snake too. Your brother like that too or he just one of them dead freaks with some blind murderous desperation? I don't understand because I've never seen these up close. Hear tell, you see. But not with my own two peepers." Middle and index brought towards his face, indicating both of those chipped-stone eyes. "What do you know 'bout that there bite you had? That's about all that Rye ever really went into with me and then, only some."

He needed that drink and by god did he take a few lengthy gulps, draining the glass.

"Bit by both? You're a cursed asshole, Glenn Douglas, is what you are. Who put that on your soul, or you always been an unlucky bastard?" Elijah laughed loud and long and reached out to the table to take up another beer to replace the empty bottle in his fist. "That woman got some explaining to do. Coyote? Fuck."

He angled his stare down at his boots, weathered and aged but polished where they could still get a gleam going. Buckles shining as his single spur. "Ain't no god. Only the presences out there and the dogs and the snakes. Nothin' to save a man's soul. Do you even got that? Brandon ain't really Brandon and this little girl ain't what she is neither. You all with your goin' Deep West...it's runnin' blind, man" he inhaled and his face got cloudy. "You tellin' me that you're Sarcina?"

For the first time since he laid his eyes on Madison, all those moons ago, Eli could have sworn his heart missed a goddamn beat.

"That's when you found that boy all tied up to a ceilin'... Michael, if I recall correctly." Thoughtful and serious as he pauses to look back down memory lane; miles of road that ain't forgiving. "I pick em off around my property when they come sniffin' but it's been declinin' for a few years now it is."

He takes a long sip of the ale as he peers over Glenn's head to some place where the coyote run.

"Well Douglas, I got somethin' for you.. perhaps. I don't which of us has it, Rye or I, givin' the back and forth over the years, but we have been holdin' onto some souvenirs, if you will. Come upstairs with me and I'll have a look see."

He rises and drains that second beer with a troubled expression as he puts the bottle down beside his first and gives Glenn a thorough study.

"Sarcina. Always gives me the damned heebee jeebees it does. How in hell did you get out of their fold?" His tone like clanking steel with the bewilderment of it all.

He scratches at his cheek and indicates that they get on inside, like the eyes of the beasts were watching. Eli could be a meticulous man and paranoia was simply another kind of careful.

Eli carries himself slowly behind Glenn but with a measure to his steps that is a man always one step slower than he should be because it gives him a minute more to fill with reflex. He stares down the hall as they cross and hears the door shut behind them and then leads them up the stairs to the first door on the right; Madison's old refuge, Glenn's too, but the blonde cowboy doesn't know that.

Inside, he moseys in that way over to the squat, tired old bar fridge and pulls out two cans of Pabst (it's all he could find on the way into town at some two-bit podunk hole and man, he nearly cried) but it's cold and it's beer and there's one for them each before he starts across the room to get down on his knees and reach beneath the low, flat, sad bed and pull out some cigar boxes and a long, narrow rifle case. "I don't got the bones, then the girl does. Unless she threw em out in a fit of playin' those cards straight." He chuckles as he opens up one box on his knee and runs the tips of his fingers through the bullet shells, screws, a few claws. "Nope, not here. I'll keep lookin'.

I didn't know about them three. Only Leo. Only one I cared about. Been watching the hills for that bastard for all these years, Douglas. All these years..." as he shuts another cigar box with a shake of his head and tucks it back beneath the spring bed. Then he sets about unlatching the rifle case and digging underneath it for some of his other souvenirs. He feels around beneath the gun, in the little hidey hole he's got going. "No. Girl must have em.

Ask..." Eli sighs and shuts the case and stares at it for a second. He doesn't even know if it's going to work or see more futility. He slides the rifle case back under the bed and gets to his feet.

"Ask Rye about the teeth. You got a plan for gettin' this guy in the ground? Bein' that he's cunning and not all man?"

He took a swig from the can and walked over to the single desk where he sat on its corner and watched Douglas with a kind of marvel.

"Wouldn't take you for a mystic man nor a man to be puttin' much into a dream. You're a queer sort, Douglas." Eli gives him a stare and then looks over to the window and makes that tick sound against his teeth. "Who's teeth."

There's that gleam to his eyes of amusement but underneath that a kind of worry when he looks back.

"You say you don't got a plan because this ain't your average man well. I'll tell you somethin' new. Years ago, after that delivery of bullets you and the girl made to Lofton, there was some..." he rolled his wrist a few times, his hand with fingers fanning out, "commotion we'll see. Upset. One night, this man comes into town, stranger like. Hadn't seen him before, but then I hadn't seen lots of people because I kept and keep to myself on my land. Go into town and do what I gotta and git. But there's this guy, he's sayin' he wants wants a room at the hotel there. Same one you found that boy hangin' in. No one else is speakin' up, man behind the desk is slurrin' his words and there's a fat ol' bottle of rum beside him, so I take over. I take the fella's cash, look over the register, check in, check out's, give him a name.. not in no mood to break up a brawl.." he waves the beer as he speaks, lifting it where his voice isn't so flat, and looks out the window a few times.

"Gets to the part I need his name and he says to me, that fuck, Ortiz. And then I look a little closer." Eli leans out on the table, face darkening like he's right there, in that hotel, back in the day. "I say to him, is that so, well, what's your first name. He smiles like the devil himself and says Leo. Then Eli did get himself a brawl. And he got himself a few teeth too."

Eli doesn't want to continue the rest of the story. He doesn't want to go into it, says just enough and folds an arm across himself as he takes another swig then crushes the empty can in his hand and places it on the table with a delicacy.

"Those pegs are with Rye."

"Somethin' else?" He asks with a cough to clear his throat suddenly closing in like on a landslide of tension. He twists up off the table and walks over to the small, cheap fridge to take out two cheap beers which he hand delivered to the other man before cracking open his. "Tell me more about the kid."

He nursed the knowledge about Ortiz with a knowing but appreciative look to his face as he stepped around to lean over by the window and look over the streets below around another sip. "As for me, he did his hexxin'. Whatever you want to call it. Hoodoo shit. He took my life away from me. Sometimes time takes away things and that is its own crime. I wonder if things would be any different." Eli slicked a hand back through his hair and lowered his brows into a considering frown. "I don't know that they would be, but that man cursed me in ways that sometimes get to hurtin' more than any bullet. Slow poisonin'."

He exhaled out his nose and folded his arms, the can held tightly over the back of one hand as he looked back outside.

"You see yourself stayin' in this town for good? Man like you don't linger anywhere long and yet you got yourself a record in this town that you ain't had elsewhere. I read up on you, so did my Mabel, who I believe you met one time."

The blonde cowboy blinked a few times in distant thought.

"Wish I'd taken more than that asshole's teeth."