Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (37 page)

A half hour before Zane blew Lucky Snodgrass to hell with his LeMat, Angel had stepped through the low, arched door at the base of the cylindrical tower with the wolf’s head perched atop its dome several hundred feet in the air.

She’d seen the tower just as she and Hathaway had been ambushed in the street. Somehow realizing that Charlie Hondo and Ravenna were in the tower, Angel traced a circuitous route to the bizarre structure. She’d known Al had been hit—she’d taken a graze to her upper right arm, herself—but saw that he’d been able to pull himself to relative safety in the alcove.

The moon was climbing, and Angel knew she had precious little time to stop the wolf leader and the witch before they attained whatever dark power they were after. She had to abandon Al for now and go after them.

Now she stared into the dank dimness before her, where
stone steps spiraled up the tower into musty darkness. She pricked her ears to listen, but there was only a ringing silence in the cavernous cylinder punctuated by the increased shooting along the street behind her.

She knew that Charlie and Ravenna were in here. When she’d first set eyes on the building with that snarling wolf’s head capping it, she’d known it had to be the place they’d been heading for. The three other ghouls had placed themselves on the rooftops nearby to keep the hunting party away from it.

She started up the steps, and immediately the darkness and the close confines, the chipped stone steps rising steeply before and behind her, made her feel as though a giant fist were closing around her. Claustrophobia tugged against her, making her legs stiff. When she’d climbed what she’d figured to be about sixty feet, however, the light from the full moon pushed through small, diamond-shaped notches carved into the walls about two feet apart from one another. The stairs appeared in the milky half-light, forever rising, forever falling away behind her.

Gradually as she climbed, voices emanated from somewhere above. At first they sounded like little more than a vibration in the golden walls. Little by little, however, the vibrations separated, became two distinct sounds, and as she continued to climb she could make out a man’s voice and a woman’s voice. Mostly the woman’s. Ravenna seemed to be doing most of the talking.

“Chatty bitch,” Angel muttered to herself—a lame attempt at dulling the myriad fears clinging to her like thorns.

It was soon only Ravenna’s voice that Angel was hearing. The witch was chanting loudly, her voice growing louder and louder so that Angel could plainly hear the echoes now. She was speaking in Spanish, and Angel could hear only bits and pieces of
what the witch was chanting—something about many years passing, the full moon, a new age beginning for the wolf people.

Angel quickened her pace. She stopped when the moonlight revealed the steps opening onto a flat surface, the walls falling away. Lifting her Winchester fully loaded with silver, Angel continued up the steps, walking slowly now on the balls of her boots, and stepped onto the floor above. She found herself in a vast circular room lit via the diamond-shaped ports in the walls by moonlight.

Two torches flared, fixed in brackets against the walls on the other side of the room, which was three steps below Angel, who remained hidden in the shadows against the wall behind her, near the stairs. Angel squinted to see more clearly in the dawn-like light, and then she frowned.

On the far side of the circular room sat a giant, golden chair. It was a throne with two golden wolf’s heads rising from the back, two giant wolf feet serving as front legs. Sitting in the chair was Charlie Hondo. The ghoul was tense and stiff, arms resting on the chair arms, and he stared straight ahead, expressionless, eyes wide, as though he were in a trance. The gold hoop rings dangling from his ears shone like silver in the angling moonlight.

He looked pale and wiry, sitting there in that big chair in his cavalry blues that were a size too tight for him, the pants too short. He looked ridiculous, his long hair mussed, several days of beard growth darkening his jaw, the two blasphemous tattoos on his sunburned cheeks. The man—or god—for whom the throne had been built must have been three times Charlie Hondo’s size.

Behind him and a little to his right stood Ravenna de Onis
y Gonzalez-Vara in black leather, with red boots and a red sash blowing out away from her in a breeze that Angel could not feel. The witch held what appeared to be an eight-sided amulet above her head. It, too, was made of gold. She had her eyes raised toward a round hole in the domed roof filled with the blue black of the moonlit sky. Through the diamond-shaped ports in the dome, Angel could see the moon rising on an interception course with that hole in the dome.

Angel stepped forward to the edge of the wall shadows and raised her Winchester, drawing the hammer back. Her hands inside her gloves were hot and sweaty. Her heart thudded. Drawing a deep, slow breath, she planted the carbine’s sights on Charlie’s chest.

Something peeped sharply nearby. Startled, Angel lowered the rifle a few inches and looked down. A rat stood on the sunken main floor, staring up at Angel, twitching its whiskers and wiry tail.

Ravenna broke off her chanting and raised her voice more loudly as she said in English, “You don’t think I know you’re there?” She laughed wickedly, still holding the amulet above her head.

Angel pressed her cheek against the Winchester’s stock, narrowing one eye as she slid the sights over Charlie’s chest, the ghoul staring at her now, eyes sharp but his face otherwise still expressionless. Again, Ravenna laughed, making Angel’s hands jerk as she tried to slide the bead at the end of the carbine’s barrel into the V‑notch above the breech.

A cat wailed sharply, the snarling cry filling Angel’s ears. Her hands jerked, and she nudged the rifle up, the gun exploding
and the slug slamming into one of the wolf heads rising above Charlie Hondo’s pale, bony shoulders.

The cat—it couldn’t be a cat!—wailed again. Angel saw something large move toward her from where the rat had been standing a few feet before and below her. The gray, yellow-eyed mountain lion lunged up the three steps, showing its long, curved fangs, and began to leap toward Angel as the marshal stepped back and swung around, ejecting the spent cartridge and throwing a fresh one into the chamber.

The cat was a gray blur bounding up off its springlike hind feet. Angel screamed as she lowered the carbine’s barrel, pressing it hard against the cat’s chest and squeezing the trigger, the explosion muffled by the great feline’s powerful body.

The cat slammed into Angel, pinned her arms down to her sides. She dropped the Winchester, heard it clatter to the gold-cobbled floor a half second before she hit the floor on her back and shoulders, slamming her head down so hard that everything went black and silent. The clack of boot heels grew louder in her ears, and she opened her eyes to see the great cat staring glassily down at her, its forehead pressed against hers.

Its glassy, dark brown eyes rolled around a little in their sockets, and the jaws spasmed. Angel felt the hot blood spilling out of the hole she’d drilled in the beast’s chest, soaking her vest and running down between her breasts to her belly.

Ravenna reached down, grabbed the back of the dying cat’s neck, and pulled it off of Angel, who drew a deep breath and closed her right hand over one of her pistols.

“Did you kill my dragon, too, you fucking bitch?” Ravenna’s shrill voice echoed sharply off the gold walls and the dome, the
round hole in which was growing brighter and brighter. “It was you, wasn’t it? I know it was you. I just now saw it! Dragons do not materialize out of thin air without some effort on the part of the conjurer, you know!”

“Here,” Angel said, flicking the keeper thong free from her Colt’s hammer and sliding the piece out of its holster. “Let me make it up to you.”

She jerked the gun up and began clicking the hammer back, but she did not get the barrel leveled on Ravenna before the witch slammed her bare foot hard against the underside of Angel’s wrist. The pistol flew up out of Angel’s hand, hit the floor behind her with a sharp thud, and slid back into the shadows.

Ravenna leveled an ivory-gripped Remington at Angel’s head and cocked it, smiling. “Get up. You’re interrupting us and the Lord of Darkness, who stirs even as I speak, and you’re piss-burning me bad!”

Angel lifted her head, wincing, and looked around the witch toward Charlie, who sat as before, stiff and tense, trancelike. He was staring toward Angel, the moonlight sharp in his otherwise flat eyes.

“But I won’t kill you,” Ravenna said, reaching down and pulling Angel’s other pistol from its holster and tossing it away with the other one. She removed the ivory-gripped stiletto strapped to the marshal’s right calf, tossed it away, then ripped two whang strings from Angel’s leather pants. “No, I am going to make you watch the transformation. If you do not die of fright, you will die by Eurico’s fangs and claws!”

She kicked Angel onto her belly and drove a knee into the base of her back, pinning her to the floor. The witch was stronger
than she looked, and the braining Angel had taken made it impossible for her to fight. Her limbs were weak, and she was seeing double, her ears ringing madly. As Ravenna tied Angel’s wrists behind her back with the whang strings, the witch leaned down and whispered sensuously into Angel’s right ear.

“Or maybe we should make you one of us, eh? A girl such as you would be a formidable wolf in Eurico’s pack. He and I might be honored to have you running along beside us in our war against the quivering mortals!”

“Don’t bet on it!”

Angel gave a clipped cry as Ravenna grabbed her hair and jerked her to her feet. Angel got her boots beneath her and kept them moving as Ravenna pulled her savagely across the floor by her hair. Angel watched with keen frustration as her rifle faded into the distance behind her. Only vaguely did she notice that the dead wildcat was gone and that in its place lay the rat, nearly torn in half by Angel’s silver bullet.

She fought at the leather ties to no avail. She couldn’t move her hands at all, and she felt the numbness as the blood flow was pinched.

Ravenna dropped her about fifteen yards in front of Charlie, still seated in the large golden throne. Angel sprawled belly down, grunting and cursing, then lifted her head and sank back against her heels, struggling in vain against the leather ties cutting into her wrists.

“Now, watch and quake, you miserable, mortal slut! Elyhann promised that if I brought Charlie here and replaced his soul with Eurico’s, I’d share his Lord of Darkness powers.” Ravenna laughed heartily. “I guess that would make me the Queen of Darkness, wouldn’t it?” Ravenna, chuckling, set down
her gun, picked up the amulet, and resumed her position flanking Charlie, who now stood grinning drunkenly, wolfishly, down at Angel.

Ravenna resumed chanting, thrusting her tan breasts out from behind her revealing leather vest and raising her eyes once more toward the ever-brightening ceiling. After several minutes, a circular gold dais rose up out of the floor with a hollow scraping sound. In the middle of the dais lay what appeared to be an oblong, light blue vase.

A giant red heart lay inside the vase, throbbing.

With each throb, the organ grew redder and redder until it fairly glowed. It seemed to be growing, as well, threatening to burst out of the vase.

“The immortal heart of the Lord of Darkness!” Ravenna squealed, staring down brightly at the ever-brightening heart. “Oh, Charlie!”

Angel cast her horrified gaze at the hole in the dome. The huge moon had edged inside the hole. Angel wasn’t sure if it was only her battered brain registering things that weren’t there, but the moon appeared to throb with each beat of the red heart on the pedestal between her and Charlie Hondo.

Charlie’s eyes also rose toward the moon.

His chest began to expand, as though he were drawing a deep breath. The leer faded from his lips, and now an expression of magisterial awe and wonder shaped itself there. A similar expression brushed across Ravenna’s regal features, and slowly, holding the amulet in front of her breasts, she dropped down to her knees beside Charlie. She placed her right hand on his thigh and held her gaze on the hole in the ceiling quickly filling with the pulsating moon.

“Oh…” Ravenna wheezed in hushed awe.
“… Charlie… !”

Angel felt her own heart beating with every throb of the heart in the blue vase. She continued to struggle fiercely against the leather stays, until she finally tore her right hand free, scraping off a good bit of skin in the process. She glanced up again at the ceiling, and a cold sweat oozed from every pore.

She was too late.

The hole in the dome was completely white.

Before her, the heart in the vase was gone.

Charlie’s chest was red, and it throbbed. Ravenna’s chest was also red and throbbing.

Both of them were growing larger and larger as thick brown hair began sprouting on their suddenly naked bodies, their hands and feet broadening and extending into paws. Their skulls thickened, ears rising, eyes sinking, noses enlarging and extending. In seconds, they were both more wolf than human, and Angel was scuttling back on her rump, digging into the pouches sewn inside her cartridge belt with quaking hands.

Ravenna’s eyes glowed as red as her chest. Charlie’s eyes glowed even brighter.

Ravenna opened her mouth and showed her white fangs, stepping toward Angel on her four paws, what could only be a smile shaping itself on her mouth, in her glowing eyes.

“Son of a
bitch
!” Angel’s fingers closed over the silver shuriken nestling in the pouch. Quelling her fear, she gave herself over to her training and whipped her arm back behind her before flinging it forward and loosing the five-pointed silver star.

Ravenna howled miserably as the disc thumped into her chest, burying itself so deep that the tip of only one point showed through the thick matting of dark brown fur. Blood
oozed out around it. The she-wolf snarled and yipped and clawed at her chest with both paws, running in circles.

At the same time, the wolf that had been Charlie Hondo only fifteen seconds before tipped his head back and loosed a howl that filled the cavernous, round room like the yowls of a thousand wolf demons at once. The tooth-gnashing din slammed against both sides of Angel’s head like giant fists.