Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (9 page)

She began to pull her head behind the boulder, but couldn’t quite get her eyes down behind the rock. Something about the pair hammering against each other, the male grunting savagely and the female cackling and hissing Spanish curses, gripping the sides of the rock in front of her, pulled at Angel’s own loins.

She caught herself, rolling her eyes. Christ, she reckoned it had been too long since her own last tussle. A girl needed a roll in the hay from time to time to keep her mind clear for more important things, like staying alive in known ghoul-haunted lands.

She studied the pair just finishing now in the mesquites not fifty feet away from her.

“Mierda!”
Ortiz’s sister said with an angry snarl. “I was nearly there, fool!”

The male—oddly tall, not so oddly humpbacked, and wearing a wagon wheel sombrero—backed away from her, awkwardly reaching down to pull up his pants, which had been bunched around his boots. “You take too long, Leonora,” he whined in Spanish, in the bizarrely hoarse and high-pitched voice of his kind. The females spoke more like their human counterparts, slightly throatier.

“You don’t take long enough, Rubio!”

“Shh! Keep your voice down, woman! You want to let every wolf in the territory know we’re here?”

Leonora stumbled back, tripped over her slacks, and fell with an indignant yelp and rattle of spur chains. The small gold amulet that she wore around her neck glistened in the velvety moonlight.

“Leonora!” Rubio reached for her, but she pulled her arm away.

“Leave me, boy! Who is afraid of a fucking wolf, anyway? I’d like to roast one over the fire tonight. Go back to your friends!”

“But,
chiquita
…” he whined. He did not leave but stood back in the shadows a ways, his rounded shoulders set with chagrin while the woman dressed, the hump on his back adding to his air of grave defeat as it canted his head downward.

Finally, Leonora got her slacks pulled back up and her belt buckled, and wrapped her cartridge belt and pistols around her waist. Muttering angrily, she donned her black sombrero, adjusting
it carefully on her black-haired head, then stomped through a crease in the hills, heading off toward Angel’s right and out of sight.

Rubio followed, stumbling drunkenly, hanging his head in chagrin. They were heading in the direction of the singing and the strumming of the mandolin.

Angel waited. She wanted the entire gang together and in one place before she bore down on them, started planting beads with her Winchester ’73, and commenced blowing their black hearts back to the particular hole in Hell they’d all slithered out of—though some said each hobgobbie was master of his or her own hell.

A wolf’s howl rose and circled the night sky. It silenced the mandolin and the drunken voices from the direction of the hobgobbies’ camp. Angel drew a sharp breath and hunkered low behind her covering boulder, feeling chicken flesh rise along her spine.

She waited, breathing shallowly, as though the beast could hear the breath rake in and out of her lungs. Relief loosened her shoulders when no other howls followed the first. There was only silence save for the faint crackling of the demons’ fire and the beating of Angel’s own heart.

Finally, the strings of the mandolin were strummed once more. They were not tentative strains but challenging ones. Angel ground her teeth. The males and lone female spoke loudly, as though intentionally drawing the werewolves in.

Angel looked down at her cartridge belt, saw the lead and silver bullets housed there in the leather loops for such nights as this. The Winchester was loaded with lead cartridges, ready to go. She had more than enough. No need yet for the precious
silver, because hobgobbies could be taken down the same as men. Her silver-chased Colt Peacemaker was holstered low on her leather-clad right thigh, fully loaded as well, and her ancient but well-preserved, razor-edged, silver Spanish sword, a gift from her father when she’d followed in his footsteps and joined the ranks of the U.S. Marshals, was sheathed in a matching black scabbard on the outside of her right leg. Jutting from a boot was a ten-inch Mexican dagger she’d pulled off a swiller bathhouse owner in San Antonio.

In addition, she had three ninja-style shurikens with five points of thinly shaved silver tucked into two separate pouches inside her cartridge belt, over her belly. She’d trained herself to throw the discs nearly as well as a twelfth-century samurai.

She was well armed and well skilled, a formidable foe against even hobgobbies.

How many wolves could be out here, anyway? To avoid leaving a too-clear trail for hunters, they usually ran in fairly small packs.

Finally, when the music and voices dwindled and it seemed the hobgobbies were settling down, Angel rose from behind the boulder and began following the trail Leonora and Rubio had followed, moving quietly in her boots and keeping her eyes and ears skinned for a possible night guard. She doubted the demons would post a lookout—for all their savagery, they were a drunken, arrogant lot—but she hadn’t climbed the ranks to deputy U.S. marshal by being careless. Moving as gracefully as a puma, she stole up and over a low rise, following the game path through the scattered trees and desert shrubs.

Ahead, the fire’s pulsating glow shone—a circle of umber light in a slight clearing. The strummer had put away his
mandolin and was at the far edge of the firelight, his back to Angel. By the set of his head and shoulders and position of his arms, he was relieving himself in the brush.

Leonora was arranging a bed for herself a few yards to the right of the mandolin player and casting jeering glances at Rubio. Her unsatisfactory lover was keeping his head down, scowling as he poured coffee from a black-speckled pot into a dented tin cup. The two other males in the group, one of whom was the leader, Rafael Ortiz, were resting back against their saddles, grinning mockingly at Rubio, their near-lipless mouths stretched wide beneath their long, pointed noses.

Angel heard the murmur of their voices, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying. They seemed to be speaking to both Rubio and Leonora, who grunted her responses while keeping her dark-eyed, incriminating scowl on Rubio, who said nothing.

Good. They were all distracted.

Angel hurried forward, moving on the balls of her feet. She’d learned to tread quietly on the quietest of desert nights, always leaving her spurs in her saddlebags and wearing no ornamentation on her clothes. She gained a cottonwood about thirty feet from the clearing, crouched behind it, and drew the Winchester’s hammer slowly back to full cock.

Chapter 9
    

SOMETHING SNORTED

Angel had just started to take one final gander at the camp, hearing one of the men say, “You know, Leonora, back in Rio Juarez, the senoritas all marvel at my love skills,” when Leonora’s brother yawned suddenly, and said, “Forget it, Pedro. No one can satisfy my sister’s goatish lust. No one. Not even I—her brother!”

He laughed and began to haul himself to his feet, casting his eyes toward the tree behind which Angel was hunkered. She drew her head back behind the cottonwood and gritted her teeth as Rafael continued to laugh his menacing, high, squeaking laugh, and said in slurred Spanish that it was time to drain his dragon.

Leonora said, “Thank God I was that drunk only once, Rafael!”

“As I remember,
mi hermana
, you came pretty close to enjoying yourself.”

Spitting sounds of revulsion rose from the other side of Angel’s tree. At the same time, she heard Rafael’s laughter and saw a long shadow stretch across the ground to her left. The hatless silhouette continued to angle off through the trees in the direction from which Angel had come.

Rafael followed it, passing so close to the cottonwood that Angel could smell the sour tequila sweat mixing with the typical death stench of the hobgobbie. The smell filled her nostrils and brought tears to her eyes, nearly making her choke.

Rafael stopped about ten feet beyond her, facing away. Angel held herself as still as possible. She could hear her heart pounding and hoped the demon neither sniffed nor heard her, as a hobgobbie’s senses were nearly as keen as a wolf’s. Rafael growled, hiccupped, and gave a grunt. His piss streamed down before him, steaming slightly on the cool ground.

Angel gritted her teeth resolutely, her heart racing, and raised her Winchester, flipping it end for end. So much for keeping the gang corralled. She stepped toward Rafael, and, closing her upper teeth over her lower lip, smashed the rifle’s butt solidly against the back of his neck, just up from the hump on his back. She heard his neck crack, saw his head tilt at an odd angle just before he staggered forward, appearing even drunker than before, and wheezed.

“What the hell was that?” said Leonora. “
Mi hermano
, you all right over there?”

Rafael gave a long, last sigh and fell face forward on the ground with a thud and a fart.

Angel swung around with the Winchester, dropped to one knee, raised the rifle to her shoulder, and aimed into the clearing, drawing a bead on Rubio sitting on his saddle, knees spread,
holding his steaming cup to his lips but scowling over it toward Angel.

She squeezed the Winchester’s trigger. The rifle roared, punching a hole through Rubio’s wool serape and causing his eyes to widen suddenly. He dropped his coffee cup. Angel quickly racked another shell into the Winchester’s breech. There was no arresting ghouls, only dispatching them.

Before her, the others, including Leonora, had all reached for weapons, but only the male nearest Angel, a fat, bearded Mexican ghoul with one milky eye, had wrapped his hand around the Schofield jutting from the holster beside the saddle he’d been reclining against. Angel calmly drilled a bullet through the dead center of his forehead and was ejecting the spent, smoking casing, when the fourth man bounded off his heels with the agility the hobgobbies were known for, and dove like a demon missile toward the marshal. Angel nimbly threw herself to one side, rolling up off her right shoulder and springing back to her feet, but not before the fat ghoul was on her again, bulling into her chest with his head and shoulders.

Angel dropped the rifle and hit the ground hard on her back. She groaned. The hobgobbie half snarled like a wolf and half hissed like a diamondback, his eyes glowing red as coals as he peeled his nearly nonexistent lips back to show the fangs that, when the ghouls were aroused, became even longer and more savage-looking than a swiller’s.

The light in his eyes dulled, and his fangs retreated a little. Angel withdrew her ten-inch Mexican dagger from the ghoul’s side, feeling his hot, piss-yellow blood wash over her hand. She stuck it into him again, angling upward toward his heart. He
made a gurgling sound and, staring incredulously at Angel, shook his head and closed his eyes.

Leonora had frozen halfway to her feet and was staring at Angel with her lips bunched, a knife in one hand while she raised a Colt with the other. Her pointy-nosed face with close-set, dull brown eyes was twisted with near-hysterical rage, showing her curved yellow fangs, but she held fire.

In her right hand, Angel held her cocked, silver-chased Colt around the shoulder of the ghoul still sprawled and death-spasming on top of her. She narrowed an eye as she aimed down the barrel at Leonora, crouched as though ready to spring.

Leonora said throatily, just above a whisper while narrowing her devil’s eyes, “What did you do to my brother, Scar Face?”

“He was resisting arrest.”

“He was taking a piss!”

“Got me.”

Leonora screamed and triggered her pistol with one hand, then threw the knife with the other. The male atop Angel jerked as the slug and the bowie ripped into his back. The Colt in Angel’s hand roared once, twice, three times. It barked once more, flames and smoke streaking across the camp.

Leonora was sent staggering backward with the first shot, and the following rounds kept her moving and screaming like a wounded hyena, hair flopping around her head.

Somehow still on her feet, she turned around and, holding her arm across her belly, staggered off toward the edge of the firelight, dragging her boot toes and howling. Several yards beyond the light, under a drooping willow, she dropped to both knees, screamed once more, and fell flat on her face.

Angel shoved the body off of her and gained her feet, breathing hard, chest rising and falling heavily behind her doeskin vest. She stooped to clean the dagger on the dead male before her.

A wolf howled.

Angel froze.

The high-pitched wail was louder than before, and Angel jerked her head up toward a ridge forming a saw-toothed, black velvet silhouette against the stars about a half mile away. Her heart shuddered. The hobgobbies’ horses nickered and shifted uneasily off in the trees to Angel’s right, about thirty yards away.

Something snorted.

There was a thud of something heavy hitting the ground behind her. Dropping the dagger and the empty Colt, Angel wheeled, automatically plucking a five-starred shuriken from the pouch in her cartridge belt. Her eyes had just skimmed the shaggy, gray-black wolf standing crouched before her, hackles raised, before she threw the deadly silver disc with a flick of her right wrist.