Two black dogs cross against a red sky. Passing along a cliff, they're replaced with the shapes of men. Egon and Duncan look into the oncoming night. They crouch amid sharp stones and train tight eyes on where the earth ends and the tiny yellow lights flickering there in defense against the unavoidable black.

A dusty road snakes about the desert floor leading to a faraway town, and after a moment more, Egon and Duncan, again dogs, bound toward it.

-

Lourdes stands in a simple room. It's Katterina's. High above the bar and in the rear of the Guinevere Hotel, it's removed from the customers and their desires. Cries of ecstasy and anguish are replaced by only empty wind blowing off the desert and the sound of lonely wolves.

Lourdes is alone here, and he takes his time pacing back and forth before becoming familiar with these new walls. His yellow eyes wash over this barren space.

A carved and polished bed stands at one end of the chamber and an equally ornate dresser the other with only bleak, dry wood in between. The boy moves to Katterina's dresser. A line of objects sits atop this chest of drawers. Trinkets and piecemeal memories. Lourdes's eyes, though, are only on one, a tiny cross propped against the wall. He overturns the thing, pushing it down with not so much pain as disdain for the shape.

Lourdes now looks over the rest of the menagerie. These fragile scraps are the only things of Katterina's here. Her only possessions. Lourdes finds a picture of a little girl. A faded child with Katterina's hair. Age has robbed this image of its time and place, but the girl's face hasn't dimmed with the passing years. Lourdes knows her eyes, her nose, and her hair, but her smile is something new to him. Lourdes looks beyond this child, part of a row of photographs, to see the girl grow into a woman.

Katterina age five in a uniform, her clothes pressed, immaculate, and adorned with the crest of an exclusive academy. Katterina age six on a yacht with her tiny hands trying to grasp the boat's billowing sail. Katterina age seven standing in the middle of a great city in the East with her eyes to the sky, trying but unable to see the top of a building rising above the clouds. Katterina age eight kneeling with her arms around a meticulously-groomed hound in front of a sprawling estate. Katterina age nine on a train with ribbons in her hair. In the background of all the images are a man and a woman unchanging throughout time. Her parents. They look on, smiling and warm, just a step behind their daughter. But in the very last photograph, they're absent.

Lourdes picks this picture up. Katterina stands alone in black. Lourdes knows her eyes, her nose, and her hair, and her smile – her smile's gone.

"You don't look like you belong here," the boy whispers to the picture. He sets the image down, staying with it for a stolen moment before moving to the bed.

There, he's careful as he sits. Lourdes removes his cloak and, running his thin fingers through his hair, shakes loose the last of its ash. Going for his boots, one after the other drops to the floor, revealing skin the complexion of cream. Where this morning were bites, slices, and gashes cut deep into this flesh remains only polished white. Lourdes holds his feet, moving his hands slowly from his heels to his toes. The boy's lips tremble as he traces where sinew was exposed. His injuries are gone, but the pain remains. Reaching for his shirt, Lourdes slowly lets its buttons fall away, and here, where the boy wouldn't let the makeshift nurses touch, yawning wounds still bleed. Pieces of Lourdes's body simply aren't there. Mossy bandages and terrible lines of red crisscross his chest.

Stretching out his arm, Lourdes watches an ounce of shattered skin stitch itself back into whole cloth, and there's still a great deal more flesh that must mend. Here, his emaciated form exposed to the dim light, his mind flirting with exhaustion, Lourdes's strength and will meet their end. The boy collapses. Flat on his back, he lets out a hard breath.

"I wasn't ready for this."

-

Below Lourdes, in the hotel's main room, bar, and stage, the girls wipe sweat from their brows and try to keep up with their customers. The Guinevere Hotel is an unending tide of faces and flailing limbs, a mob on the verge of chaos, controlled only by their addiction to alcohol and, when their livers give out, lust. Beatrice and Katterina fill glasses from behind the bar, throwing dirty mugs at dirty men who return them empty a mere moment later. Emma, needing fresh liquor, fights her way out of the crowd and dives behind Beatrice and Katterina. She shatters her exhausted bottles and, discovering her gin's only half gone, finishes it herself. Tossing this last bottle atop a heap of broken glass, the woman reaches now for a reserve of bourbon with her right hand while emptying her garter with her left.

Emma's purse filled to the brim, coins, banknotes, and shiny stones spill over the floor.

"Where'd you scare Lourdes off to?" Emma asks Katterina, looking up as she makes everything fit inside her purse. Katterina serves four rounds of beer before she can answer.

"Upstairs," she states. The girl dishes out a shot of whiskey and two more beers. "In my room."

"What are you doing down here, then?" Beatrice laughs. Katterina opens her mouth but doesn't speak. She blushes. Emma leans in, perhaps to make certain her words are heard over the shouts from every corner of the saloon or perhaps because, drunk herself, she's not all too sure on her feet.

"She's a businesswoman, that's all," Emma speaks, tossing a gold coin to the kid.

The woman shakes her purse as she turns away, dissolving into the crowd. Moving about, passing out cheap liquor, Emma snakes a path across the floor. Men laugh. Her narrow heels move nimbly about brawls and debauchery. Men sing. Emma picks up overturned chairs and pushes overturned men into the sunset. Men shit and piss themselves. Emma tops off glasses, grabs fistfuls of sweaty dollars, and feels fingers unrepentantly stroke her secrets.

"That ain't free!" Emma shouts at a drunk, plucking his wallet as his hands roam over her hips.

Emma passes the Guinevere's doors, blowing a kiss to a wave of miners entering the bar with a day's worth of toil scribed into their cheeks. The men hoot, and all save two rush after the hostess. This last couple, though, is unmoved and merely stands at the Guinevere Hotel's doorway, watching, waiting, and watching some more. Hairy, gruff, and green-skinned, they're Egon and Duncan. The two men sniff the air. Their noses lifted and eyes closed, they breathe in. Filling their hollow chests, the demons savor each of a thousand smells spilling from the Guinevere, and then, in unison, both men snap open their eyes.

Pushing straight through the swaying mass, Egon and Duncan head into the tavern's heart. Egon looks about as he moves deeper, his eyes tracing over drunks and con men just long enough to determine each is of no interest to him. Touching tables and chairs as his feet stalk, Duncan feels for something hidden within the desiccated wood.

Deep breaths fill their lungs.

"He's been here," Egon whispers. The man's voice is too quiet, overridden by the cacophony of the Guinevere the moment it leaves his throat, yet somehow it reaches his partner.

"He's faint, though," Duncan breathes, rubbing his fingers together. "I can barely feel him."

As the two things that look like men continue to speak to each other with invisible words, all the things that are actually men turn their eyes to the Guinevere's stage. All eyes except for the outlaws' are on the ragged curtains that were sometime red as an out-of-tune piano begins to play. The curtains part to reveal Cassidy wrapped in ribbons. Yelps. The woman lifts her head, and a few scattered notes are struck on the piano beside the stage. Hollers. Cassidy paces to the edge of the proscenium and lets one ribbon slip away. Cheers.

"Do you smell something else?" Egon asks his companion, his nose pointed high in the air.

"Isolation, desperation, meat," Duncan sniffs.

"No," Egon states. "The opposite." Egon's chest rises and falls. "There's something very different here. Don't you smell it?"

"No," Duncan answers after several drawn out breaths. The demons move further into the bar, pushing patrons aside in their search. After knocking through a rancher spending the last of his life savings, Duncan and Egon are themselves hit. They collide with a hostess wearing only a duster and a smile. Julia. A minor mishap, and the men and the woman quickly go their separate ways. Duncan's vision, however, stays on the woman's gold skin. Licking his lips, Duncan grins.

-

An open window in the sheriff's office brings in a rare cool breeze. It blows about his cluttered room, carrying dust, papers, and more dust into the air. The night wind kisses Donovan's shut eyes and caresses his cheeks.

"Lisbeth..." The sheriff breathes. Donovan sleeps at his desk, a glass in hand. Melting ice clinks.

-

Lourdes lies in only his bandages atop Katterina's bed. He sleeps, but there's no peace. His body, both exhausted and tense, burns with every impossible wound that's erased. His mind falls to someplace distant.

Lost in a procession of fools, want-to-be-saviors, and the Shapeless King, Lourdes's thoughts recoil from his role in this eternal chase. His body bucks as it fights with the scars in his flesh and his brain.

Lourdes wrinkles his nose.