A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters (5 page)

“Beautiful!” Jake said. He looked at Prudence and added generously, “You can just kill the girl. I’ll kill the boy. Better he be shot and a white man’s prints seen in the area. The girl, though, she should be torn up. Savages mutilate their victims. Every white knows that, but the Navajo will feel unjustly blamed. Damn, Clyde, you’re smart.”

“I am old and perhaps have gained a little wisdom,” the Navajo said.

Prudence swallowed a surge of bile.

“When?”

“Moon’s rising full,” Jake said thoughtfully. “Be easier for you to make the change then. Why don’t we set it up for as soon as can be?”

Prudence thought about silver bullets and full moons.

“All right,” she said. “How do we get that girl out at night?”

 

Getting April March to come out proved to be almost too easy. Clyde Begay went into Eli Mercantile ostensibly to trade for a blanket. When Mr. Eli’s back was turned, Clyde slipped April a note written by Prudence, asking the girl to come to the stand of cottonwoods down by the stream that night, and not to mention the meeting to anyone.

“It won’t matter if she talks about it. If she does, she’s sure to mention an old Navajo brought the note. All fuel for our fires,” Jake chortled.

Jake seemed boisterous and ebullient, but he wasn’t so far gone as to forget to make sure Prudence took the silver bullets out of her guns, and that she left those guns behind.

“You won’t be needing them,” he said, “not on a full moon night, not when your prey is a mere child.”

And Prudence had to agree.

She shifted shape and they ran shoulder to shoulder in the direction of town. It was a glorious experience. The summer night that had seemed hot and clinging to her human form was alive with such interesting smells and sounds that she hardly noticed the heat. The loneliness that had been her lot since Jake had vanished, dissolved. Wolves didn’t talk as humans did, but she was keyed to his mood through his scent.

Glorious in all his enhanced powers, Jake was supremely alpha. Running beside him, dropping back a pace or two when some obstacle presented itself, Prudence felt a contentment she’d forgotten could be hers. Someone else was in charge. Her job would be to follow orders.

The note had told April to come out at midnight. When the two werewolves arrived about eleven, there was some activity around a few of the saloons, but everything else was dark and quiet. They had hardly quenched their thirst at the stream when an owl flew soundlessly into the grove.

A moment later, Clyde Begay’s flat, Navajo-accented voice said, “The child is coming.”

Jake shifted back to human. He stood, naked and very male, looking down at Prudence.

“We’ll fall back now. Just in case you have some fancy ideas, remember I’m here. I can kill the child, too. If I do it, I’ll make her dying last, and I’ll make it ugly.”

Prudence shivered in her skin. It took no feigning at all for her to roll over on her back, then display her belly and throat in submission. Jake laughed softly and rubbed her belly fur with his bare toes.

“Good, Sis,” he was saying when Prudence struck.

There is one type of weapon other than those made of silver or blessed by a suitably devout priest that can harm a werewolf—the fangs and claws of another werewolf.

Prudence twisted and sunk her fangs into Jake’s bare ankle. She bore down and felt the bones twist, then crack and break. Jake started to bellow in pain and anger, but swallowed the sound.

Yellow eyes glowing bright with fury, Jake bore down on his mutilated limb. Prudence felt his weight, felt his blood hot on her belly fur and in her mouth. Almost as quickly, she felt the bleeding slow, felt the stream in her mouth dry to a trickle, felt the torn skin begin to knit.

There was a reason for their clan name. All werewolves have strengths: some can tap the moon’s power farther away from the full, some can control wild wolves, some can hear the thoughts of their fellows.

The Bledsloe’s strength was that they healed far faster than normal, even in human form. When the moon’s power was upon them, even a normal Bledsloe healed quickly—and Jake was far more powerful than normal.

But Jake was in human form. Of the werewolf’s three shapes, this was the weakest.

Prudence knew minutes would be needed for those broken bones to knit. Jake might choose to ignore the pain, but he could not make a crushed ankle carry him.

She rolled from beneath the pressure of Jake’s foot, heard him stumble. As he stumbled, she wheeled around. Launching herself from a crouch close to the ground, bringing all her weight to crash into his chest, Prudence knocked Jake flat onto his back. She leapt to hold him down.

The breath whooshed out of Jake’s lungs as he landed, whistling around teeth that were already turning into fangs. Prudence knew that Jake would choose the man-wolf form. If he made that change, he would have the advantage over her. She must act before . . .

There was no time for thought, no time for planning. An errant breeze brought Prudence the scent of fresh bread, honey, and peppermint. April March would be here soon.

Hands already tipping with claws grasped Prudence around her ribcage. Claws ripped into fur and through muscle, seeking her lungs. Jake was smiling grimly, his expression already triumphant.

Prudence feinted as if to go for his eyes. When Jake flung his head to one side to avoid her darting muzzle, he exposed the right side of his neck. Without hesitation, Prudence bit into the corded muscles. The prickly guard-hairs of Jake’s budding man-wolf coat offered no protection against her fangs. She bore down, tasting salt and sweat, then blood. She ripped into meat, shaking side to side, tearing an enormous hole.

Blood flowed, then gouted. Jake’s last breath gusted out with it. In the sudden silence, Prudence heard April’s footsteps cracking over the brittle cottonwood twigs at the edge of the grove as she tried to make a stealthy approach.

A moment, a moment, and all would be . . .

Prudence threw back her head and howled, howled with sorrow and misery, howled for a brother dead and a family forever gone.

April March did not hear the grief. She heard only the cry of a wolf, dangerously close. She ran as if the wolf was on her trail. Near the center of town a rinkytink piano stopped in mid-note. Then someone laughed and someone else made a coarse comment. The music resumed.

Prudence raised her wolf’s head and saw Clyde Begay staring at her in fascination.

“I do not think,” the skinwalker said, “you will be my ally as your brother was. I will leave this place. Soon, I think, you will lead others to our cave and I do not wish to be there.”

He moved his hands and sang a few words in Navajo. In a moment, a scrawny old wolf, tail clamped between his legs, stood where the man had been. He paused, assessing her once more.

Prudence growled and the old wolf ran.

Warily, Prudence changed back to human. With the moon’s strength in her, she lifted Jake’s body up and carried it at a trot to the badlands. She buried him under a fall of rocks where no one would ever find his corpse, nor wonder at the manner of his death.

Then she sought out his cave. Five shabby wolf puppies played in the deep grass of the canyon, but they stopped hunting grasshoppers and mice as soon as they caught Prudence’s scent. They came for her with a very unfriendly look in their yellow eyes.

Prudence dealt with them as she had her brother, wondering if her heart would ever stop weeping. She forced herself to watch as five little wolf cubs turned back into five scrawny children. In the front of the cave, she buried the bodies of those Jake had hoped would be his new family.

The next afternoon, scrubbed clean, her six-guns at her hips, her rifle in the saddle boot, Prudence rode into town. There she sought Reverend Printer and told him an edited version of events.

She ended by saying, “I’ll draw you a map, so you can find the cave and the children’s bodies. Their deaths will be sad news for the families, but sometimes sorrow is better than hope.”

“So you think the trouble is ended?” Reverend Printer asked.

Prudence snorted. “As long as humans are humans there will be trouble. All I’m saying is that one madman is dead.”

“Fallen down a cleft in the rocks.”

“That’s what I said.”

Reverend Printer nodded. Prudence could tell he didn’t believe her, but also that he wasn’t going to push it.

“And you came here why?”

“He was my brother. Mama always told me we shoot our own dogs. We don’t leave the job for someone else.”

Then Prudence Bledsloe, last of the Bledsloe werewolves, mounted her big buckskin stallion and rode out of town.

“Y
ou won’t go hungry here,” my mother told me, as she set my suitcase down and rang the bell of our Lady of the Angels Home for Girls. Night was falling. Her face was so thin she looked like a skeleton, and I tried not to show my fear. For her. Of her. If she ever died, I would die, too.

It was December 23, 1929, and everyone was afraid. The stock market crash, the bank runs . . . overnight, our world had blown up, and we were not very good survivors. We were fragile females, used to being catered to and doted on. My mother had lived like a queen—like the Queen of Los Angeles—and I’d been my father’s princess, and he took care of everything. My mother had never touched a paper bill or a coin in her entire married life. It was a bargain ladies made with society—we would barely exist in the world, and in return, men would love us.

But my father hadn’t loved us enough. On Halloween, he had leapt from the ledge of his office window in the Crocker Bank Building on Santa Monica Boulevard.

They are vampires
, he had written in his suicide note.
They have sucked the life’s blood from this country.

We didn’t know who “they” were. The industralists he played golf with? The glamorous movie stars who made deposits in his bank at two in the morning? We didn’t know, and so we couldn’t protect ourselves against them.

I couldn’t understand how one day we had servants and cars and pantries bulging with food; and the next, our Los Angeles house was gone, and so was our apartment overlooking Central Park. And so was my father. But it was all gone, as if sunlight had burned it up. As if we had awakened from a long and beautiful dream.

Now we had less than nothing, and I was hungry for everything I used to have, for my future, for my life. We tried everything, but we simply had no money.

We began to starve. We didn’t even know how to buy food; and I think the greengrocer and the butcher cheated us, because they thought we were still rich. We didn’t know how to haggle or bargain. We’d had people to do all that.

And so, my mother took me to the orphanage, where they had people.

I was only fourteen but as we stood before the door, I felt as tired as the woman who had dragged herself down the palm-lined avenues of our exclusive neighborhood up in the hills. We had seen her many times since the crash. She was once quite beautiful, but her desperation stole her beauty from her day by day. Wrinkling and aging, she sold apples on some days, pencils on others; and all her jewelry after the apples and pencils got no takers. I didn’t know who she was, but the sight of her somehow pleased my mother. She would laugh rather crazily, watching the woman from the window of the home that soon would be gone.

Once, as the woman stumbled along the street, my mother turned to me and said, “You can never trust other women, Bess. Remember that. They will want what you have. Your husband. Your home.”

Then she stared at the woman with pure hatred on her face.

I called her Our Lady of the Vampires, because vampires had killed my father, and ruined us, and I sensed that once upon a time, she had been a threat.

“You won’t be hungry,” my mother whispered, her voice breaking, as we waited at the door of the orphanage.

As the door to Our Lady of the Angels Home for Girls creaked open, the same dried-out woman glowered down at me, or so it seemed. But this woman was different—older, thinner, and dressed in the black and white habit of a nun.

By the watery light of a ceiling lamp surrounded by the motionless blades of a fan, the withered old woman glared at the two of us as if she hated us. I began to panic, and I grabbed onto my mother with both hands.

“Please, no,” I begged. “Mother, don’t leave me here.”

My mother burst into tears, and I did, too. She clung to me, and ground out in agony, “How could they do this to us? How could
he
do this?” and I hugged her so tightly I thought her pencil-like spine would crack.

My stomach growled.

“Come now,” said the nun, grabbing my forearm. “Stop that. This is difficult enough for your mother without your dramatics.”

As we entered, I heard more sobbing.

And when my mother left, still more.