Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (12 page)

Angel doffed her black Stetson and ran her gloved finger around the sweatband inside the crown, not looking at him. “How is it you know so much about the wolves, Uriah?”

“What’re you talkin’ about? Haven’t I been huntin’ ’em since I came out here ten years ago?”

“How do you know you have to kill ’em while they’re changed or they’ll come back and haunt whoever killed ’em?”

Zane studied her beneath ridged brows shaded by his sombrero’s broad brim. “Hell, that ain’t no big secret. The Injuns have known that for a long time. I heard it from a Crow medicine man up in Montana, when I first came out here lookin’ for the Angels.”

She slanted a skeptical eye at him, holding her hat in her hands. “That’s how you learned it? The only way you learned it?”

Zane sighed and poked his hat up his forehead. “How else would I…?”

He let his voice trail off, and then a sourness settled in his gut, like a swig of bad milk.

“I saw your back.” She set her hat on her head and looked away from him, staring off at a distant dust devil. “Why didn’t you tell me, Uriah?”

“Ah, hell.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t see the point. You’d just see me as different and there’d be no convincing you otherwise.” Zane gestured behind them as though to indicate the wolves they’d killed last night. “I’m not one of them, Angel. I’m still me. I have it in me, true enough. But I’ve learned to control it.”

She shot a cold, incriminating look at him. “Like hell.”

“I’ve told it straight, Red. I am one of them, but then again, I’m not. I talked to a Comanche shaman down in Texas. He taught me how to keep the devil on a leash.” Zane paused, studied her as she studied him with that cold look of accusing. “But if you want to ride out, go ahead. I won’t stop you.”

She continued to study him but her expression had gradually changed to one of utter befuddlement. “There was a full moon last night, and you…”

She remembered the frantic grabbing, clutching, caressing, sucking, grunting, the throbbing light in his wolfish red eyes as he’d brought her several times to heights of passion she’d not only never before experienced but never even realized were attainable. Even now, despite herself, a wave of near-savage desire washed over her just thinking about it. If he rode over to her now, grabbed her, thrust himself against her, she’d have a hard time stopping him, because she wouldn’t want to.

But she had to. She’d never share his bed again.

He was one of
them
—one of the demons they hunted.

He was reading her mind. “I didn’t tear your throat out, did I?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I told you. I can control it.” He looked at her pointedly. “It’s not like your father, Red.”

She’d just opened her mouth to respond when a stone rattled down an escarpment behind her.

“Down, Red!” Zane clawed the Colt Navy revolver from the holster positioned for the cross draw on his left hip.

Angel threw herself sideways out of her saddle, hitting the ground on her left hip and shoulder as an arrow whistled through
the air where she’d just been sitting, to clatter among the rocks on the trail’s other side.

Zane’s pistol quickly roared three times. A shrill cry sounded from the escarpment, and Zane leaped off the palomino’s back, hitting the ground running as the Apache rolled down from the niche in the scarp where he’d been drawing back a second arrow nocked to his painted ash bow.

As the Indian in deerskin leggings and calico shirt piled up against a boulder at the base of the scarp, the wolfer dropped to a knee and aimed his Colt up the slope, sliding the barrel from right to left and back again, ready for another flat brown face to appear among the rocks and crags.

Behind him, Angel rose to her butt, palmed her Peacemaker, and rocked the hammer back. She’d lost her hat, and her hair hung in a mess about her shoulders.

“Any more?” she asked.

Zane squinted one eye as he aimed up the slope. His heart thudded, but his hands wrapped around the gun were steady.

“Not yet.”

He drew a deep breath. One advantage—maybe the only advantage aside from slightly keener vision—of having been bitten by the raggedy-heeled stage robber Alden Woodyard, north of Laramie, was having a heightened sense of smell. Like his magnified vision and hearing, he didn’t always have it, but when he needed it most it came to him, and he could smell the wild musk and blood scent of the dead Indian lying nearby.

But in the slight breeze wafting over the top of the escarpment he could detect only sage and cedar, maybe the cucumber smell of a snake den up there among the boulders.

Lines cut across his broad, sun-leathered forehead.

No. There was more. And he could hear something else now, too—the clomp of unshod hooves.

“Wait here.”

He straightened and, lowering the rifle, bounded up the slope, leaping from one boulder to another until he’d gained the crest of the ridge. Hunkering low and doffing his hat, he peered between two boulders and through a scattering of gnarled cedars, down the slope’s other side and to his right.

Dust rose about a quarter mile away. Beneath the sun-burnished cloud was a string of galloping horses ridden by small, brown men in calico shirts and bandannas, long, black hair flying out behind them in the wind.

Some were armed with bows and arrows, spears lashed to the sides of their mustang ponies. A couple had what appeared to be repeating rifles—both Winchesters and Spencers, Zane could see now, squinting—jostling down their backs by rope lanyards. The Apaches—Lipans, judging by the design of the war paint on their cheeks and foreheads and on the withers and rears of their galloping horses—were cutting across a sage-stippled flat on an interception course with the trail that Zane and Angel had been following.

Through the roiling dust, Zane counted fourteen braves. The pack had heard the reports of the wolfer’s pistol, and now they batted their moccasined heels against their ponies’ flanks, heading toward the scarp.

Zane doffed his hat and ran back down the escarpment, leaping from one rock to another, moving easily, with a light-footed grace and agility that was a by‑product of his new condition. “Mount up,” he told Angel, who was holding the reins of both their horses. “War party behind us.”

She tossed his reins to him and swung up into her saddle, wincing a little at the ache in her ankle. “Apaches?”

“Lipans.”

“Wolves on the prowl last night must have stirred ’em up.” The Indians held the white-eyes responsible for increasing the werewolf activity in their native lands, since they also blamed the whites for driving the beasts west in the first place.

“Yeah, a full moon will do that.”

Zane hammered his heels into General Lee’s loins, and the big palomino bounded up the trail, the casket clattering along behind. Zane glanced over his shoulder as Angel galloped up beside him. He could hear the thudding of the Apaches’ unshod horses as they approached the scarp from the far side.

“How many?” Angel asked, pulling her hat low on her forehead.

“Too damn many, and they’re well armed. If we can make it to Cimarron, a couple miles ahead, we should be in the clear.” Zane holstered his Colt and shucked his Henry from the saddle boot, cocking it one-handed.

“Cimarron’s farther than that, Uriah. It’s a good five miles from here.”

The ghoul hunter shook his head as he held his reins in one hand, his rifle in the other, its barrel resting across his saddlebow. His crossbow jostled from where it hung from his saddle horn. “Don’t think so.”

“I think so!”

“You got no sense of direction, even less of distance.”

Angel said something that Zane couldn’t hear because just then a war whoop rose behind him, above the thudding of the hammering hooves and the cracks of rifle fire. A bullet spanged off a rock just left of the trail, and General Lee shied slightly.

The wolfer ground his heels against the palo’s flanks once more, urging more speed. Angel followed suit, reaching forward and sliding her Winchester from the sheath lashed to her saddle beneath her right thigh. “We’re gonna have to make a stand, Uriah. They’re comin’ fast, and those mustangs are built for speed!”

Zane glanced behind. Angel was right.

He nodded in reluctant agreement as they followed the trail around another escarpment. When the Indians were out of sight on the scarp’s other side, though their hooves continued thudding, their savage war whoops rising, Zane pointed over his horse’s head toward where two mounds of volcanic rock humped on the left side of the trail. The dykes lay side by side with what appeared a twenty- or thirty-foot-wide crease between them.

“See them rocks?” he shouted. “Pull in there. They’ll have to swing back, and that’s when we’ll take ’em!”

After three more strides, they checked their horses down suddenly. Both gave indignant whinnies as they spun on their back hooves and were sent storming into the gap between the two volcanic dykes pocked with solid bubbles and streaked with bird shit. Ahead along the crease, Zane saw a ragged fox leap across the path and disappear into a hollow at the base of the right-side lava mound.

He and Angel reined their horses down at the same time. They swung out of their saddles, Angel cursing when her right foot touched the ground. They’d both just raised their rifles and started running back toward the trail, when a weird rumbling sounded and a windy whooping noise that was much louder than anything the Indians had voiced earlier issued from overhead.

A foul-smelling wind picked up dust and weed seeds, and there was a rumbling like that of a distant twister. The air warmed instantly.

Screams cut the air above the thudding of the loudening horse hooves, and then the war party was riding past the mouth of the gap in which both Zane and Angel crouched, rifles raised to their shoulders. Instead of aiming down the barrels, they were both looking around with incredulous, haunted looks on their faces.

The entire pack of Indians and horses galloped past the gap as a large ball of licking, crackling, smoking orange flames consumed them. Men and horses screamed shrilly, raising gooseflesh across the wolf hunter’s broad back. The stench of charred flesh and horsehair filled Zane’s nose as he heard Angel gasp beside him.

A half second later, a vast shadow passed over them, and they both looked up in time to see what appeared to be the striated belly of a giant fish fly over them from about twenty yards above the rounded tops of the two dykes. A snakelike tail of scaled, burnished bronze flicked and curled. The creature was so huge that it made a rushing sound, kicking up its own wind, lifting another small twister around the ghoul hunters.

“What the hell was that?” Angel asked, looking wide-eyed up at Zane and blinking against the windblown grit.

The ghoul hunter was startled out of words. He blinked as he stared out the mouth of the gap between the escarpments, where he’d just seen what he couldn’t possibly have seen—the entire war party, men and horses, galloping inside a great ball of orange fire. He could still hear them screaming, smell them burning, though he could no longer see them behind the dyke.

Lowering his rifle, he ran forward, then stopped at the mouth of the gap and looked to his left, the direction in which the burning riders had been galloping.

Slowly, he moved out from the gap and into the trail, still blinking in disbelief at what he was seeing—all the Indians and horses now strewn in ragged black mounds along the trail and in the desert to both sides. A few of the horses thrashed as they continued to burn, but they and the braves were all down, scattered as though they’d fallen from the sky.

Most of the braves appeared dead. One was crawling into the desert off the trail’s right side, shrieking while orange flames licked up around and over him. He was fried to black cinders. Finally, he stopped, rose to his knees, lifted his head, shrieking still louder and raising his arms as though in supplication before flopping to the ground and falling still.

Zane heard Angel’s spurs ring as she walked up beside him and stared at the burning horses and fallen braves.

“Law,” Zane muttered in his soft Southern drawl, running a hand down the black stubble on his face, his eyes glassy with shock. “Seen it once. Hoped I’d never see it a second time.”

“In case you weren’t paying attention,” Angel said, her voice rising as she lifted an arm to point at the sky, “you’re about to see it a third time.”

Zane followed her finger. The dragon had banked and, flapping its great jointed wings and flicking its long, kitelike tail, was headed back toward them, narrowing its snakelike eyes as it homed in on its prey, black smoke licking from its nostrils.

Chapter 12
    

WOLVES AT HIGH NOON

The four wolves ran as one across the mesa, long, thick hair of varying shades of gray and brown ruffling at their necks and glistening in the high, dry Colorado sunshine. They ran side by side, none breaking stride until the willowy, square-headed beast on the far right was distracted by a jackrabbit and swerved away from the main group to give brief chase until the jackrabbit dove into a hole among some rocks and prickly pear and stared out, quivering.