#temp.

[ 001. ] august lovelace is born in belmont, nevada. he's got everything he could need, back then. ma and pa and a little brother. the lovelaces live mostly quiet, back then. his mother tends to home and hearth, and his father goes out traveling the old trails with the revolver on his hip.

the west is full of ghost stories. witches and spirits and monsters that stalk the night. someone has to clean them up, to make sure the civilized world stays civilized, as much as it can. not that it's that simple, even on the frontier. history and hatred still bleeds through, but the lovelaces stand their ground.

pa tells stories. by the house, there's this old gnarled tree. under that tree lives the needlewoman, who sews the world together and keeps the seams together.

this revolver, he tells august, slipped through the seams. you see that gold in the barrel? all that's made from the seams of the world.

so it's lucky, says august.

pa smiles, then. it's a old, old smile. no. i wish it were.

pa wears a cross when he goes out on the road. when the gun pases from father to son, the cross is looped around the barrel, chain broken. the note next to it is in old, fanciful writing, as if written by quill and ink. one bullet that always strikes true. thirty days of your life given.

[ 002. ] the key to this story is the revolver that august, who will be called six-gun lovelace in a scant few years, calls amen. the revolver has passed through the hands of three other lovelaces before him. apparently, it was cursed by a witch that lived alone among the shrub-steppes up along the sierra nevada mountains. or maybe it was a spirit haunting the mines. or maybe it doesn't matter. what matters: the deal was struck on the lovelace name. the gun won't miss. the gun will never miss. aim with your heart and it will strike true. but each bullet fired erases thirty days of heartbeats, gone as clean as the life you took.

you must understand the cost of your bullet. you must decide the worth of your life.

august's great-grandfather died at forty. his grandfather died at thirty-five. august's own pa died at thirty-two, dead in the dirt to a thing of sloughing flesh that crawled out of hatview hole and began terrorizing a town.

the gun came back home, sitting on the kitchen table the next morning. pa's body never did.

[ 003. ] august goes hunting. like all of them do. it's a calling, or it's a trade, or it's whatever you want to call it.

he's daring, though. he starts off in the mountains, and then he keeps going further and further east. he follows rivers, takes trains, hops across the american frontier and into the more civilized places. there's still monsters, of course. he carries plenty of salt and iron. he carries old charms and everything he needs to not end up dead, because it's that or his brother ends up with the burden.

he keeps walking.

kills, on occasion, and imagines his life burning down like a candle, invisible in the moment even as the fractions build.

the jobs pay. it keeps him going. sometimes he doesn't even think about home for that long, even if he wears a cross around his neck too.

then he finds the blooddrinker out in the bayou, who might be more a spirit. it's an easy job. shoot her. done.

it might even work. but it doesn't. that's his own hand's fault, no one else's.

[ 004. ] the gun's terribly cold in august's hands. never warm until the moment it fires, and then almost freezing over just as quick.

he aims it.

he doesn't pull the trigger. he doesn't pull the trigger that time, or any other time afterwards, even when he should. he stays. thinks he's about to get himself drowned or eaten or both and neither of those things happen. they fall in love. sometimes he'd lean in the doorway and watch mae, and he'd think of how he could kiss her or put a bullet in her eye and they were both the same thing.

so he kisses her. it's easier that way. she eats up a month of his anyway, and then two, and he's cleaning up the bayou instead, which is its own lifetime of work.

but it won't last. the job's still there. so he leaves, and he tells a lie. nothing can kill her, not even amen's six barrels. it keeps them both safe. it's the right thing to do.

mae's angry about the leaving. that's her right, and it's his sin. she sends signs from other hunters who try and fail to kill her, terror sewn in them. he smiles, just a little. told you so.

goes back to the killing, the work, all up and down the midwest and the east coast. everywhere his shoes can take him. ignoring how it might bring him back to her.