Jackie is our token human.

She's quite seriously badass, pale skin and blue eyes, skimpy outfits and cowboy hat and all, but she's our token human — and that comes in handy quite a lot.

It's a little surprising how well this works, really; and it doesn't exactly improve my general opinion of humans.

See, it should be common knowledge that nothing is as it seems, out here in the West. It should be common knowledge that something that appears innocent and vulnerable most likely isn't. It should be common sense that when such a thing starts to smile at you — you best turn tail and run as fast as you can. Then, maybe, you have a chance to get away with your life.

Apparently, though, none of this is common at all.

Good for us.

(Decidedly not good for the humans who've made themselves our targets.)

Jackie is our token human, and right now she's smiling.

Maybe it's because humans don't really seem to get along with one another, I muse absently as dust is kicked up and a shout pierces the air along with a gunshot. They don't tell each other these things. That would certainly explain why there's so many bounties to collect, just a few years after their arrival. Hm. Or maybe—

But then I kind of have to stop musing, because that was our signal.

Well, usually we try not to let Jackie shoot the humans we're after, because for all the DEAD OR ALIVE it says in all caps on the wanted posters, most often the implied emphasis is on the latter.

But this one had it coming, so.

I'm not mad.

And if I allow a little smirk to play across my face, well, there's no one here who'd judge me for it.

Orea is the most responsible one out of the four of us, so she's the one to go through the trouble of making sure the dude is actually still alive.

She slithers her way over to him, carefully avoiding both the spreading pool of blood and Jackie's still smoking gun, and uses the tip of her tail to roll him over onto his back.

Going by the way he immediately starts screaming in pain he's just fine, and Orea pulls a disgusted face as she wipes her tail off in the dirt.

"Sorry for that," Jackie says, with some remorse.

I raise an eyebrow at her. "Really?"

Jackie frowns at me. "Well, not for shooting him, of course. But I wouldn't want to have to touch that scalawag either."

"You realize we'll have to carry him over to the wagon now, do you?"

"Oh," Jackie says. "Damn."

"We could make him walk. You just got him in the one leg. The other one should still work perfectly fine." Perrie, the second-youngest, thinks aloud — and the man whimpers when he hears her, rather pathetically. "Or maybe not."

I shrug. "We could still try. It's not like he ever cared if someone else was hurting, did he?"

"I think you're mixing him up with the one from two weeks ago," Terrie interjects, considering, and then she shrugs. "Not that it matters, most likely."

Only she and Perrie are technically sisters, but it's much nicer that people just know us as the Four Sisters and start shaking (if they haven't yet learnt that running is the better reaction — though they never do get far, of course). And that doesn't even exclude our token human (I should really stop calling her that, even in my head, although it's so much fun to rile her up), because her last name is 'Four' (or at least that's what she told us when we first met — I'm still not convinced that even 'Jackie' is her real name).

But alas, I digress.

Again.

"Back among the living?" Jackie asks, when she notices me looking up from the dusty pool of blood, and nudges my shoulder.

"Har-dee-har," I say, and then I frown. "Where are the others?"

Jackie rolls her eyes and flashes a quick grin. "Went to get the wagon. We don't actually want to carry him, you know?"

"Oh, yeah. Good idea." I watch as Jackie flicks her long blonde hair over a shoulder, a little mesmerized.

Then I shake myself out of the stupor when she holsters her gun and gets her knife out instead to start scratching at the dirt caught underneath her nails, and I firmly decide to take stock of our current situation.

We're still hiding out behind the saloon, and it's still fairly quiet.

As always, we've made sure to spread the rumors of our arrival to just the right people, and, as always, we told them not to worry about any strange sounds.

As always, though, our plan doesn't work out quite right.

Another scream shatters the air. It's much higher-pitched than the holy-shit-I-just-got-shot kind of scream, and when I whirl around to the source of it, I come almost face-to-face with a young centaur-girl.

Too young to have heard the rumors and know what they meant.

Too young to just be able to look away from the scene that looks like a murder-in-progress, especially with the way Jackie's knife glints in the sunlight.

"Oh fuck," is all I have time to say before the girl rears up on her hind-legs in shock, then promptly turns tail and runs (gallops) away.

Good instincts, little one, I think approvingly, even as I feel proven right in my assumptions that it's really just the humans that lack any common sense and knowledge; even as I realize that we're probably going to be in deep shit any moment now.

"Naga!" the girl shouts as soon as she's disappeared around the corner. "There's a naga in town!"

Scratch that 'probably'.

Spreading rumors is all fine and good, as long as the rumors reach the right people — and only those. If the rumors (or factual confirmation of them) reach the wrong ears, though, well.

It's fight or flight.

The Four Sisters do have common sense, and we know when to start running (in a manner of speaking).

The Four Sisters have common sense, and we have our token human — who is really both stupid and brave, and decides to focus on the important things in life; actually making sure we get the bounty for all our hunting.

And if she decides to focus on the DEAD rather than the ALIVE and make use of her knife, well.

I won't complain.

And so the Four Sisters move on to the next town, through the Wilds of the West.

It could be such an idyllic life.

Traveling across the plains with my sisters, with Jackie.

Going where the wind takes us, always on the move, but always home, because home is where the heart is, and my heart is right here.

But then, one day, it's not.

A few weeks after we chose flight over fight, dead over alive, I wake up and Jackie is gone.

I don't know it immediately, of course. The early morning sun is blinding after a night under the stars. I stretch, coil and uncoil my body, and taste the air.

And something is wrong.

There's a taste that's foreign, and even more alarming, another one that's stale. It has never been stale ever since we first met Jackie, since she became our token human, because we never left each other's sides.

I sit up abruptly, and I don't scream, but the hiss that escapes me basically amounts to the same thing.

It ensures, at the very least, that my sisters are awake, even though that does not feel like nearly enough, even though I'm paralyzed with a kind of fear that's hard to put into words.

Jackie is gone. Jackie is gone. Jackie is gone.

My mind whirls and spins and buzzes with static, a white-out and endless repeat of no, no no, it can't be, not her, not now, not here.

Not when I just started to realize that home can mean so much more than distant memories of nest-mates and the fear of larger predators.

"Ashe! Calm down, she's fine!"

I blink rapidly, trying to detach myself from my panicking thoughts, but it's hard.

It's only when Orea snaps, in a commanding tone, that "Jackie is fine!" that I snap out of it.

"What?" I ask, still faintly dazed. "What do you mean, she's fine? She's gone!" My voice cracks.

Orea makes a calming motion with her hands, but the rattle of her tail belies her own anxiety. "Look, there's no blood. Yes, someone else was here, and she's gone, but physically, she's fine. She wasn't injured. She went willingly."

Somehow, that feels worse than the alternative. A weight settles in my stomach, heavy and hollow and gnawing.

"Huh," is all that I manage.

"She left us." My throat constricts, my eyes burn. It's the desert dust.

"She didn't even say goodbye." My voice comes out in a monotone, but I can't really process this.

Movement at my periphery draws my attention to Perrie. There's a scrap of paper in her hands, a too-familiar wanted poster for DEAD OR ALIVE turned upside down. "She left a note," Perrie says, her own voice rough.

She left a note?

I try to work up anger at this, indignation or even a feeling of betrayal, but there's no fire in my chest; it's just the weight in my stomach that spreads, a black hole that's hungry and looking for things to destroy.

Numbness spreading down my arms to my fingertips, I make my way over to Perrie, read the note over her shoulder because I can't stand to touch it.

"i am Fine. i have to leave nOw. i will miss yoU all. i don't know when we'll see each otheR again — i hope it's soon. love, jackie."

It's a weird note. It doesn't read like her at all, and I almost expect there to be a code, or a hint, a secret message or something, but the only thing the capitalized letters spell out is FOUR, and that doesn't mean very much at all. Well, it does mean everything, of course, but I can't see how it's relevant here, and why she'd go through the trouble of doing this.

"It's weird, isn't it?" Terrie asks, and I haven't even noticed her slithering up next to us.

"Yeah," I say. "What the hell is FOUR supposed to mean?"

Orea joins us with a question in her eyes, and even Perrie hisses in confusion.

I roll my eyes, and the black hole recedes a little bit. "Come on, we have a reputation to live up to here, the Four Sisters surely aren't very scary at all if they can't even read the four only capitalized letters in a note."

"Oh," Terrie realizes, the first of them. A pause. "Yeah, no clue."

Orea frowns, but there's a considering look on her face, almost as if she's on the brink of a realization. "I think... we may need to go back to the beginning to figure this out."

The beginning.

The bounty on Jackie's head.

The way it turned out to be "all a big mistake".

The way Jackie hesitated when we asked for a last name.

The way "Four" rolled off her tongue like it had a bigger meaning, like it was heavy and tainted and treasured.

My fingers shake, a little, when I reach out to take the note from Perrie's grasp.

They shake when I flip the note around, the wanted poster, the bounty we collected for choosing DEAD.

My fingers steady when my eyes catch on the name of the man we hunted, because now I have a mission.

And despite all the unanswered questions I know that Jackie did not want to leave, but she may have had to. She may have felt she couldn't trust us, or maybe she didn't want to burden us. But as my eyes linger on Jordan Five I know that whatever else happens, we're going to get her back.

Jackie is our token human, and we leave no one behind.

And I am going to get my heart and home back.