Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (11 page)

“That’s how I knew you were out there. Tracked you up to that little box canyon you tied ole Cisco in.”

She looked at him riding off her left stirrup. He rode easily
in the saddle of the big golden stallion, trailing the wheeled casket.

“You didn’t have to come.”

He didn’t look at her but stared straight ahead and didn’t say anything.

“One thing about shootin’ wolves during a full moon,” he offered after a time, “is they’re sure to stay dead.”

“Yes, I remember.” Angel lifted her gaze to the full moon that had shrunk down to the size of a newly minted dime and was riding straight above her head. “If you kill them when they’re men, their souls will haunt you, depending of course on the strengths of said souls. But if you kill them when they’re in bad need of a shave, like the bunch back there, they
stay
dead.”

“They go back to Hell where they come from.”

She looked at him again in the darkness. “You really believe all that hillbilly lore?”

“I surely do, Red.”

She couldn’t keep the admiration from her voice as she said with a tender smile for him, “You’re one of a kind, Uriah. I’ll give you that.” She hardened her eyes at a remembered slight. “You son of a bitch.”

He widened his eyes innocently. “Now what’d I do?”

“Why didn’t you wake me before you left last time? In Nebraska. Coulda said you were pulling out, said, oh, I don’t know, maybe
good-bye
? You know how stupid and cheap that makes me feel? Goddamnit, Uriah—I got a reputation to look after the same as you, and you know how many folks in that relay station knew you left me sound asleep up there in the dark after you rode out, like I was your six-peso
puta
?”

Zane hiked a big shoulder. “Sorry, Red. I reckon I shoulda
woke everybody up and told ’em I told you I was leaving and didn’t pay you for your services.” He arched a skeptical brow at her, emphasizing the irrationality in her thinking.

“And I—
I
, Uriah—led you to those three spooks! Because I knew you were riding the grub line and in need of a stake! And that’s how you repaid me, by making me look
cheap
!”

“I ain’t no grub-line rider, goddamnit!” He’d raised his deep voice with its rolling accent, and it caused Angel’s paint to jerk its head up with a start.

Uriah’s fury, and the way it made his eyes turn a dark shade of amber, always took her aback. She’d seen him furious—raving mad—and it had caused her to close her hands instinctively over her Colt’s butt, in case his fury would turn toward her. It never had. But it always made her ill at ease. She’d always figured it was his brooding nature and violent temper that held him back from others, that kept him riding his own lonely trails.

“That’s not the point, Uriah,” she said finally, softly, turning her head forward in silent supplication. He’d saved her hide tonight, and she had no good cause to rile him. Besides, she knew that what she’d really wanted back in the Nebraska relay station was for him to have stayed with her another day or two. She hadn’t wanted him to leave so soon. Waking and finding him gone—his side of the bed cold—had hurt her feelings, and that, in turn, had embarrassed her.

Since she was a girl, her embarrassment had always turned to anger. And her anger, like Zane’s, held her aloof.

For another half hour, they followed the trail between steep sandstone ridges, the one on the right curling out over the canyon like a massive stone tongue, blocking out the moonlight and the feeble starlight.

“Good Lord! Where are you taking me? We’ll be in Wyoming before long,” she said as they climbed a low rise, having to ride single file now as the trail pinched down to only a few feet between piles of boulders that had fallen from both ridges, nearly blocking the canyon in places.

“Here.” Zane stopped the big golden and stared under the overhanging ridge where a small cabin hunkered, seeming to glisten, as though outfitted with jewels of some kind. “It ain’t the Larimer House in Denver, but I reckon it’ll do for a full-moon night.”

Angel heeled her horse off the trail’s right side and into the massive shadow of the canyon wall. Out of the moonlight, she gained a clearer view of the cabin—an incredibly stout hovel constructed of what appeared to be full pine timbers, with a slightly peaked roof also of pine. The door was two pine trees joined by a heavy Z‑frame and bearing a stout iron latch. On either side of the door were steel brackets apparently for locking the cabin from the outside.

The shiny ornaments on the cabin’s outside walls were not sequins but silver-chased horseshoes and deer and elk antlers. There was even a silver-chased bear skull mounted over the door, under the overhanging roof.

Angel turned to Zane, who’d ridden up beside her and swung heavily down from the stallion, shucking his Henry repeater from his saddle sheath and racking a shell into the chamber. “Wait here, Red.”

The big man strode to the cabin and tipped an ear to the door. He pulled his head back, and called just loudly enough to be heard from inside, “Hello, the cabin. Anyone here?” His deep voice sounded bearlike in the heavy silence.

He waited a few seconds, tipped his head to the door once more, and then tripped the steel latch and drew the door open with his rifle barrel. The heavy door shuddered, its hinges squawking like red-winged blackbirds.

He stood in the black opening for a time, holding his rifle across his chest, then ducked under the low doorframe and disappeared inside. Angel remained aboard her paint, watching, looking around this cool, dark side of the sheltered canyon, the moonlight washing over the ridge above her to fill the canyon beyond with liquid pearl.

Inside the cabin there was the rattle of a lantern mantle. A match scraped, and a dull, gradually intensifying glow leeched out the open door. The mantle pinged again, and then Angel saw Uriah’s big frame move just inside the door, where he laid his rifle across a table before ducking back outside.

“How’d you know about this place?” she asked him.

“Belongs to a friend of mine, Abel Lundquist. We’re on his ranch. Leastways, it was his ranch.”

She stared at the hovel’s silver trimmings. “Abel’s a spook, isn’t he?”

“Yep.” Zane stopped in front of the cabin door, hooked his thumbs behind his wide shell belt, and stared out over the canyon. “
Was
a spook. Got bit just after the War, when the Hell’s Angels first come west.”

After a long, brooding pause, Zane said, “Abel built this cabin for nights like this one here.” He tipped his head to look at the moon kiting across the gray-blue sky. “He was worried he’d kill his family and the men who worked for him. One of those men, his
segundo
, put a silver slug in him last month when he refused to lock himself in the cabin before the moon filled
out. Mary, his wife, gave the order. But only because Abel had told her to if he ever got too weak, too savage, to seclude himself here.”

“I’m sorry, Uriah.”

“Ah, hell, it’s the same old story, ain’t it? Hell’s opened its doors, and there’s no closin’ ’em now.”

“They’ve always been open. At least, as long as I can remember.”

The big man gave a dry chuckle. “Keeps my larder filled, anyways, I reckon.”

Angel stepped out of her saddle, forgetting the nasty twist in her right ankle, and sucked a sharp breath against the pain shooting up her leg.

“Ah, hell, I’m sorry, Red.” Zane left his horse and strode quickly over to her, grabbing her arm. “Here I was woolgatherin’ during a full moon when I should have been getting you inside.”

“I have to unsaddle—”

Again, she was in his powerful arms before she could finish protesting, and she wrapped her arms around his neck as he carried her toward the cabin. “Uriah,
please
!”

“Hush, now, damnit.”

He carried her inside the sparsely furnished hovel, turned left, strode past an eating table on which the lantern flickered, and laid her down on a large, high bed covered with bobcat hides. He sat down beside her, shucked out of his gloves, and picked up her ankle, gently probing with his thick, brown fingers.

“Where’s it hurt exactly?”

She looked down her legs at him, his soft eyes merely hazel now and filled with concern as they stared at her. She looked from his broad shoulders and the hard expanse of his chest under
the wolf vest and his tight buckskin shirt to his flat belly, then returned her gaze to his hands.

They were large and thick and brown from years of the frontier sun. Powerful. A killer’s hands. But she could feel the warmth of them seeping into her twisted ankle, assuaging the pain. The heat oozed up her legs and into her belly, ensconcing her heart, which quickened.

She swallowed as she lay back on the pillow and stretched her arms toward him, flexing her fingers desperately. “Goddamnit, Uriah.”

He removed his hands from her ankle, crouched over her, lowered his head, and closed his mouth over hers.

Her body turned warm as summer honey. She opened her mouth for him, welcomed his hot tongue with her own. She rose up a little, pressed her breasts against his chest, squirmed around, feeling her need for him growing in her loins, and groaned for him.

He pulled away from her, stared into her eyes, and pushed her back down onto the bed. “I’m gonna tend the horses. I’ll be back.”

He swung around and ducked out of the cabin. She lay there, feeling desolate, hearing him outside tending the horses, leading them away, likely to some hidden corral.

She squirmed around with the need for him, hating herself for feeling this way about one man when the frontier had plenty. Not that she hadn’t sampled others, but it was this burly, hillbilly ghoul hunter from Carolina who stuck in her craw, who made her want him and need him when she wanted to need no one.

When he returned, he closed the door, shutting out the moonlight, and walked over to the bed and began shucking off
his clothes. Angel’s breasts swelled under her tight vest as she watched him slip out of the wash-worn balbriggans that clung to his brawny, towering frame like a second skin. Naked, his big member flopping against his thighs beneath his hard, corded belly, he turned to open a window shutter, and stare out into the night.

“No one followed us, Uriah,” she said, appreciating his white, muscular buttocks and the backs of his bulging thighs. “I’m sure of tha…”

She let her voice trail off as she stared at his broad back, the right shoulder blade protruding slightly as he crouched to peer out the window. Angel’s lips parted as she gazed at him, awestruck. At the bottom of the wing-like blade was a mass of knotted flesh about the circumference of one of Zane’s own hands.

It was jagged and ridged with scar tissue. The scars were teeth marks—two larger than the others.

Fang marks.

Angel gasped.

“Don’t hurt to be careful,” Zane said before straightening and closing the shutter. He turned to her, his black-bearded face twisted in a wry grin, eyes spoking at the corners, his member jutting with raw, masculine desire.

He frowned. “Figured you’d be out of them duds by now.” He moved toward her. “Never knew you to be shy, Red.”

She had risen up on her elbows. Her heart throbbed. Her voice was too dry for speech.

She stared at his eyes, in which she could detect little amber sparks, like the coals of a burned-down campfire, and her belly twisted with horror. As he sat down beside her, making the bed’s
wooden frame creak under his weight, part of her wanted to bound up off the bed and run away from him, to go screaming and crying into the night.

No, Uriah, not
you
, too!

But he had her out of every stitch of her clothes in a minute, his breath raking her naked, tingling skin as he breathed harder and harder with his passion. He buried his face between her full, ivory, pink-tipped breasts, raked his thumbs across her nipples, and drew a deep breath as though to capture the raw essence of her in his lungs.

And then he flung himself between her legs, which her own raging desire spread for him. He cupped her breasts in his big hands, mashed his mouth down on hers, sliding his hot tongue between her lips as her hands closed over the taut, hard slabs of his buttocks.

And then nothing in the world—not even that he might be one of those he himself hunted—seemed to matter anymore except their two bodies toiling and writhing together.

Chapter 11
    

THE BURNING WAR PARTY

“Shy last night and quiet as a church mouse today,” Zane said the next morning, as they followed a wagon road northwest, in the general direction of Denver. “Red, what’s got into you?”

She turned toward him. Her eyes were troubled beneath curved, red brows. Her hair, tinged with orange in the midmorning light, blew around her tapered, fine-boned cheeks in the cool breeze. She turned away from him and brushed her knuckles across her scar, as she did from time to time, mostly when she was upset about something.

She didn’t say anything but he could tell that her head was filled with unexpressed thoughts and emotions.

Zane reined General Lee up sharply. “What’s got your neck in a hump? You haven’t said one word since breakfast, and then you only said ‘no’ when I asked if you wanted more coffee. If I
was a self-doubting man, I might think you didn’t enjoy yourself last night, Red.”