But she couldn’t help but notice it was becoming uncomfortably hot down here, as the sun climbed closer to noon, where there were no trees, and the bare dirt of the street did nothing but reflect the heat back. She took off her hat to fan herself with, and wished there were someplace to get a drink of water. She was, in fact, giving serious consideration to cupping some water in her hand out of the dubious depths of the horse trough—not to drink, but to splash over her head and neck—when Aunt Jinny and Matt and Josh Holcroft rounded the corner at long last. They all three waved at her, and Matt and his son went into the Company store, while Jinny joined her on the bench.

Her aunt leaned over as if to offer a confidential thought. “Th’ earth’s nice’n cool deep down. Jest reach on down thar an’ let it pull th’ heat outen y’all.”

Then she straightened up. She pulled off her own hat and fanned herself with it—but her face wasn’t flushed at all, and there wasn’t even a hint of sweat on it. Anna closed her eyes and tried to do as her aunt had suggested.

She let her awareness sink down beneath her . . . and her aunt was right! She sensed a coolth, and then found the earth itself pulling all the heat out of her! In fact, she had to cut it off before too long, before she started to shiver!

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there, wrapped up in this new application of magic, but when she opened her eyes, Matt and Josh were just coming out of the store with their arms laden with purchases.

“Le’s git loaded up an’ outa here,” Matt said to her aunt. “By noon this town’ll be a oven.”

“Got no argument from me,” Aunt Jinny agreed, and got to her feet. Anna followed a moment later.

And that was when the strange man came around the corner that Jolene had vanished around.

He was big and strong and surprisingly healthy for a miner—for a miner he certainly was, given his massive physique, in a town where the only real employment was mining. Black-haired and blue-eyed, he strode down the middle of the street as if he owned it, as if he was wearing a “flash” suit and smoking a big cigar, not a collarless linen shirt, brown moleskin trousers, and bracers and smoking an old cheroot. Urged by instinct, Anna looked at him with that inner eye—

And sure enough. There was the Glory.

Except he had no shields, and the Glory was wrong . . . twisted somehow. Not a glowing gold, but a muddled, ugly color that actually seemed to take its strength from the poisoned earth.

“Go in th’ store, Anna,” her aunt ordered in an undertone. Anna did not argue. She felt a fear of this man she could not rationalize but did not care to fight. She whisked just inside the Company store door and peeked around the edge of it.