Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (14 page)

Just as the old man’s had been, their screams were short-lived.

The terrified horses, still strapped to each other but free of the wagon tongue, ran off across the yard, dragging the double tree and kicking their back legs in horror.

Charlie Hondo changed back into his cavalry-suited man form. Then both Lucky and One-Eye changed into their more soiled but well-armed frontier visages. They stared down at Curly Joe, who lay facedown in the dirt beside the recent wheel ruts made by the stage.

Lucky ran to him, placed a hand on his arm. “What the hell happened, Curly? The stage run you over?”

Curly grunted and pushed up onto his knees, snatching his hat off the ground beside him. He looked at Charlie. “I didn’t change!”

Charlie scowled back at him, confused.
“Say
what
?”

“I didn’t change, Charlie. I was just about to—I could feel the hairs pushing out and my hands and feet growin’ big, and just as I was about to jump off the coach, I went back to myself so quick I couldn’t catch myself. I was expectin’ to land on all fours, and…” He winced as he hauled himself heavily, painfully, to his feet.

“Same damn thing almost happened to me, Charlie.” One-Eye adjusted his black eye patch and rubbed the slight paunch pushing out his blue wool shirt, the V‑neck of which was held together with strips of braided rawhide. “I felt a little hesitation, sort of a weakness. And now…” He made a face and continued to rub his belly. “I don’t feel so good. This never happens during a full moon. Of course, I don’t change so quick then….”

Charlie snapped his head at Snodgrass. “What about you?”

Lucky shrugged. “I didn’t have no problem. What about yourself, boss?”

Charlie had just opened his mouth to speak when the cabin door, which had been standing open, closed with a
bang!
A girl’s voice shouted from inside, “You mangy wolves pack up and fog the dusty trail. I got a shotgun loaded with silver dimes, and I’m just itchin’ to use it!” Her voice grew shrill. “Wolves at high noon—I never seen the like.”

The four killers looked around at one another. Their moods lightened. Charlie smoothed his long, shaggy mustache with the index finger and thumb of his left hand.

Smiling wolfishly, he began striding toward the cabin. “Fellas, I smell purty young female flesh.”

Chapter 13
    

RAVENNA AND THE DRAGON

“She sounds like she’s got some spunk,” said Lucky as he and the others followed Charlie to the cabin. “I like my wenches spunky.”

They stopped just off the edge of the ten-foot-wide gallery as Charlie mounted it, stepped to one side of the door, and hammered it three times with his fist, causing dust to leap from the cracks.

“You, in there,” the alpha wolf called. “You’d best open this door and toss the gut-shredder out. You got me mad already, callin’ us names who you’ve never met. And you had the nerve to threaten werewolves with silver? Come on, you little bitch, what’s got into you? I’m so mad now, I’m liable to suck your throat out your asshole and spit it back in your face!”

“Might just do that, anyway,” said Curly Joe, bending his knees slightly and adjusting his crotch. “After I drill her, I mean.
I ain’t had me a mattress dance in a month of Sundays.” He grabbed his crotch and lurched hungrily up and down, bending his knees. A thoughtful cast entered his gaze. “I wonder if I can do it changed….”

“You mean as a wolf?” Charlie asked.

“Why not?”

Charlie shrugged as though the idea hadn’t occurred to him but was worth considering.

“Best proceed with caution,” advised Lucky, sliding his long-barreled Remington and rolling the cylinders across his forearm. “You heard—silver.”

“Where in the hell’d she get silver out here?” One-Eye wanted to know. “Silver dimes, no less!”

There was no mineral, not even gold, more precious than silver. The only thing more sought-after on the entire frontier was blood-swilling girls with Indian blood—especially blood from the most savage tribes like the Crow up in Montana, the Utes in Colorado, and the Comanche, Apache, and Yaqui in the Southwest and Mexico. They were ferocious as well as rare, and it was said that if a man survived a night with one, no other woman could ever satisfy him again.

“Mr. Jipson done stored ’em up,” the girl obliged One-Eye’s inquiry. “And I got two loads snugged down in both these ten-gauge barrels, so you take your hairy, foul-smelling asses and vamoose!”

Her shrill voice broke on that last.

“ ‘Hairy, foul-smelling asses’?” Charlie said, gritting his rotten teeth and glaring at the door, blood vessels bulging in his forehead. “Listen, you fuckin’ little bitch, you open this door or I’ll break it down. If I have to do that, I’m gonna be even madder than I am now!”

On the other side of the door, the girl sobbed.

Charlie grinned.

He licked his lips, absently massaged the cross tattooed on his right cheek, and gentled his tone. “Honey, look. Werewolves, we are, indeed. You got us pegged. But, while we are werewolves and we did kill your employers merely for the enjoyment of a bloody kill, we’re tired now. We’d just like food, beer, and rest. We got money. We’ll pay you.”

He paused, taking a deep breath as though speaking so gently, suppressing his rage, was sapping his energy. “Best yet, we’ll let you live. Now, won’t you please open the door?”

The girl’s strong, defiant voice was gone. Weakly, befuddledly, she asked, “How in the hell’d you fellas change into wolves right here in broad daylight? The full moon was
last
night!”

“Let us in, honey, and we’ll tell you all about it,” said Curly Joe, voice pitched with lust.

“You’ll turn again,” the girl said, “and you’ll do me like you did Mr. Jipson and Eb and Leonard.”

“No, no, no,” said Charlie. “But I’ll tell you what we will do if you don’t open this door.” He calmly removed his hat, inspected the gold braid, flicking bits of dust and weeds off it with his fingers before lowering the hat to his side, and, face swelling up and turning as red as an Arizona sunset, shouted,
“We’ll burn this bloody place right down to the ground, and you along with it, you defiant little whore!”

Silence.

Curly Joe snickered as he and One-Eye and Lucky stood just off the gallery, thumbs hooked behind their cartridge belts, Lucky holding his Remy pointed at the door, in case the girl should storm out firing.

From inside, the girl’s frightened voice: “You promise you won’t kill me.”

Charlie swallowed. “I promise,” he said as gently as he could, his voice quavering.

Another stretched silence. Then there rose the scraping of a locking bar being removed from over the door. The steel and leather latch clicked, and the door squawked as it drew inward a few inches to reveal a young girl’s pretty, freckled face staring through the crack. Deep furrows cut across her freckled forehead, and her eyes were suspicious, fearful. “Remember, you promised.”

She screamed as Charlie rammed his shoulder against the door. As the girl fell back into the stage station’s thick shadows rife with the smell of grease, tobacco, and woodsmoke, Charlie bounded inside and grabbed the shotgun out of her hands. The girl hit the floor on her butt with a yelp, and Charlie stood just inside, his long shadow falling across her body clad in a low-cut flour-sack dress.

She was barefoot, and her pale blues eyes sparked with fear between wings of her long, straight, tawny hair.

The other men sauntered into the station behind Charlie.

“She’s purty, all right,” said Lucky, swallowing hard and glowering down at the girl.

“Right well set up, too.” Curly Joe doffed his hat and started forward, tossing his hat onto the table. He glanced over his shoulder at Charlie. “You want her first, boss?”

Charlie scowled, his fists still balled in fury at his sides. “Nah. You boys deserve first turns with her. I reckon I owe you that. Besides, I think she stinks worse than we do.”

Curly Joe turned back to the girl and began unbuckling his cartridge belt. “You an’ me, girl, we gonna have us some fun.”

“No!” The girl jerked her arm away from him and heaved herself to her feet. “You promised!”

“Promised we wouldn’t kill ya,” said Lucky as he and One-Eye followed Curly Joe after the girl, who scrambled, stumbling and falling and trying to run barefoot on the scarred wooden floor. He gave a whoop. “You ever tumble with a werewolf before?”

As Curly Joe, One-Eye, and Lucky went after the girl, Charlie walked back out onto the veranda, at the edge of which he stood and, tipping his face to the softening sunlight and a slight breeze wafting down from the high country in the northwest, dug a long, black cheroot from the breast pocket of the warden’s rough wool shirt. From behind him came the girl’s curses and sobs as the men apparently cornered her in the cabin’s north corner.

Charlie scratched a match to life on the warden’s black cartridge belt and touched the flame to the end of his cigar.

A whirling sounded in the far distance.

Charlie passed the sound off as merely a gust in the freshening breeze, but as he blew his match out with a puff of cigar smoke, he curled a dubious brow as he stared into the rolling rock-, sage-, and cedar-stippled desert beyond the station.

The whirling grew louder and louder, and for a moment Charlie wondered if the station wasn’t about to be hit with one of those infernal cyclones that plagued the flat, less arid country a little to the east, when a large, dark cloud slid into view, its fishy white belly raking the top of a high, northern ridge. Charlie scrutinized the shadow as he blew more cigar smoke out his broad nostrils, and felt his lips part as his lower jaw sagged slightly.

The cloud had enormous, flapping wings and, all alone in the cobalt sky gaining a darker cast as the afternoon waned, was fast approaching the stage station. It wasn’t a funnel cloud. It wasn’t a cloud of any kind, Charlie saw now as the sunlight winked off the lime-green and golden scales, and the dragon’s wagon-sized head, like the head of a deadly, giant diamondback rattlesnake, turned toward him, eyes like burning green and red coals.

Flames shot out of the dragon’s nostrils—two slender jets of orange fire flicking out like twin tongues merely testing the air before receding again into the bizarre beast’s antenna-adorned head. The flames’ black smoke was torn away on the wind.

“Yeeeee-HAWWWWWWWW,” came a cry beneath the whirling sound of the dragon.

Charlie looked away from the fast-approaching winged beast then, realizing that the sound had to be coming from the dragon itself, turned back to it as its great, bat-like wings rose and fell while its finned tail curled out behind it, propelling it along from behind.

The cry came again, and as the dragon approached the station from a mile out now, dropping and coming on fast, Charlie made out a slender figure astride the dragon’s back, throwing one arm out and whooping as though the fool were riding a bucking bronco in a Fourth of July rodeo in Abilene.

Charlie squinted his eyes incredulously.

A
female
fool. Long, black hair flew out behind the woman’s head in the wind. Her willowy, curvaceous body was clad all in black and brown, with a red sash and matching red boots angling back against the dragon’s broad body. In contrast to the dragon’s girth—the beast was the size of a small barn—the girl appeared
little larger than a cat as, yipping and yowling and throwing up her arm, she held in her other hand the leather ribbons of a braided gold harness of sorts that curved around the beast’s stout neck. Beneath the woman was a red velvet blanket trimmed in gold, with gold tassels fluttering in the wind as the beast now made its final approach, the sage and cedars shivering in the wind of its sinewy wings.

Charlie tipped his brim low against the ground fog of dust, straw, and horse shit. He couldn’t help chuckling then, as he recognized the woman astride the dragon, and stepped down off the veranda and walked across the yard as the dragon set down between the crazily spinning windmill and the cabin.

“What the hell’s that?” shouted one of the men from inside.

The girl’s cries had died to mere whimpers and occasional snapped curses.

Boots thumped on the worn puncheons behind Charlie, as the pack leader strode several yards out from the veranda and stopped, grinning around the cheroot smoldering between his teeth, crossing his arms on his chest, and rocking back on the heels of his polished cavalry stovepipes. Sitting atop the now-idle dragon, who blinked its copper eyes slowly at Charlie, short bits of fire curling from its nostrils and its wings flexing slightly as they settled against its sides, Ravenna de Onis y Gonzalez-Vara pinched her black hat brim in salute.

The pretty Mexican
bruja
, or sorceress, swung her right leg up in front of her, where a saddle horn would have been had she been using a saddle, and dropped spryly down to the dragon’s left wing. From there, spreading her arms out for balance, the red sash and the tails of her long, black leather duster fluttering out around her, she dropped straight down to the ground.

Striding toward Charlie, the witch glanced over her shoulder at the idling dragon, and said,
“Siente y comportese, Chico!” Sit down and behave yourself.