Blood Riders (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

“C
hee, you got any ideas?” Hollister whispered, his eyes glued to the line of mounted warriors.

“No, sir,” Chee whispered back.

Hollister cursed himself. He had been so eager to get here, to find a trail to follow, that he’d acted without any common sense. He had the Ass-Kicker and his Colt, and Chee had his two pistols, all of them loaded with the special ammo Winchester had given them. He wasn’t sure how accurate the new guns would be at a distance. And Winchester had said the Ass-Kicker only had four shots before it needed to be recharged by the steam engine, which of course was all the way back in Denver. Crap on a biscuit.

The Ute leader, a tall, regal-looking man, nudged his pony forward as he pulled his rifle from the saddle scabbard. It looked to be a breech-loading Sharps. Hollister cursed again. Favored by snipers and buffalo hunters, it would be accurate at a great distance. The Ute made no other threatening move, but kept his pony striding toward them at a slow walk. After a few paces, the rest of his war party drew their weapons and followed suit.

“Chee, I think we . . .” Hollister started to say, but never finished—for out of the woods to their right and up above the mine shaft, plunged a lone figure on horseback. The horse was a large, black stallion, and the rider was cloaked in a hooded duster, covered in black from head to toe. The horse ran impossibly fast, and whoever guided it was obviously experienced in the saddle.

“What in God’s name . . .” Hollister muttered.

“It is the woman,” Chee said. “She has followed us here.” He had no proof of this, but he was sure of it just the same.

“Get ready, Chee,” Hollister said.

Chee said nothing, unsure of what he was supposed to get ready for, but he took a few short steps back, easing his way toward the horses and the cover of the buildings.

She reached the outskirts of the camp, reining the horse around the buildings, barrels, empty wagons, and other obstacles. Surprisingly, she headed straight toward the Ute war party. Dog was up now, his hackles raised and a low growl sounding in his throat as he watched the mysterious rider confront the Indians.

“Dog, hold,” Chee said. Dog moved so that he was now in front of Hollister and Chee, his rump pushing into Chee’s legs. He quieted but never took his eyes off the rider.

The woman spurred the stallion again and it bounded forward another thirty yards, where she reined to a stop. The Utes looked as surprised and confused as Hollister and Chee did. But after a moment, they regained their senses and started forward again.

The woman threw back the hood of her duster and her long blond hair unfurled.

Chee and Hollister kept backing toward the horses and the general store, taking advantage of the diversion. Dog crept along with them, his muscles tensed and coiled.

A Ute war cry pierced the quiet and the sound of it nearly made Hollister jump. To his surprise, the Utes turned their horses and rode hard back to the north instead of charging. In shock, Hollister and Chee watched until they disappeared from sight.

Their eyes went to the solitary figure on the horse. With the Indians gone, the woman dropped her head, slumping at the shoulders. Hollister wondered if she might be praying, but then she raised back up, stretching back and forth as if she had just woken from a nap. She turned the horse and slowly trotted back toward where the two confused and surprised men stood.

Hollister couldn’t be sure, but he could almost swear that smoke was rolling off her face and hair.

Chapter Twenty-seven

S
haniah could not guess what instinct had commanded her to intercede on behalf of Hollister and the man-witch. When she saw the Ute warrior advance toward the two men, it became clear to her the situation was rapidly deteriorating. If Hollister was killed here, she might never find Malachi and his band. Without thinking, she spurred Demeter to action and raced down the rise toward the oncoming Utes.

Her desperate charge had momentarily surprised and stunned the mounted warriors. When she pulled back her cowl, unleashing her long, flowing blond hair, they were further confused. Who was this strange white woman riding to her death toward them? they must have thought. When she skidded to a stop, perhaps thirty yards remained between her and the startled Ute leader. She had only a few seconds. The sun was already heating her skin and she could not be without the cover of the cloak for much longer.

With her back to Hollister and the man-witch, she was able to transform, showing her Archaic face to the Utes. Knowing the superstitious nature of the people confronting her, she was sure they would be frightened away. As her eyes blazed and her face moved, her jaw dropping and her fangs descending, the Indians went wild-eyed with fear. The leader’s horse reared and whinnied, nearly tossing him from its back. With all the strength he could muster, he steadied the animal and retreated toward his men, their shouts joining his as they rode off the way they had come, not sparing the quirt to their horses.

When they were gone, she sat still on her horse, feeling her facial features return to normal. Archaics could survive for a limited amount of time in the sunlight. And unlike some other vampire species, it would only burn and weaken them, not kill them. But she could not afford to let it weaken her any further. She raised the cloak back over her head, turning Demeter and spurring him at a trot toward Hollister and Chee. She reined the horse to a stop twenty yards away from the two men.

Chapter Twenty-eight

C
hee kept his hands on his pistols as the woman advanced toward them. He knew it was her, without question, could sense it without having ever seen her face. She was the one who had followed them, had come to the warehouse in Denver, for reasons he didn’t know. And he was fairly certain she was a Deathwalker. The cloak, hiding her face from the sun and light—all of it pointed to her being one of Van Helsing’s vampires.

“What the hell just happened?” Hollister whispered to him.

Chee didn’t answer, never took his eyes off the woman, who sat on the great stallion as still as a statue. He was tense, instinct telling him to pull his guns and shoot her down, but he remained calm, waiting to see what the major wanted to do.

“Can I help you?” Hollister said to the woman.

“Sir, I don’t think we . . .” Chee started to say, but the major held up his hand, silencing him.

Don’t do this
, Chee thought.
Don’t bring her into your circle, Major. She is death.
He was more certain of this than he’d ever been of anything in his life. The woman on horseback before them was death.

“I
say, can I help you?” Hollister repeated. The woman on the horse said nothing. A few paces behind him he heard the squeak of Chee’s holster as the young man gripped his pistols so tightly Hollister thought he might shatter them. The sergeant was tensed and anxious, ready to fight.

“Easy, Chee, let’s see what she has to say,” he said quietly, “and see if you can steady your friend there.” Dog was still on alert, ready to pounce on the woman.

“Major, I don’t think this is a good idea,” Chee said.

Hollister turned away from the woman to study the young soldier.

“Maybe not. But she just chased off forty Ute warriors without a weapon. I have a feeling if she wanted us dead, we’d be dead already.” When he gazed again at the woman, she removed her hood, revealing her face.

With his first clear look at her, Hollister felt her beauty strike him like a punch in the gut. She was beyond gorgeous, her blond hair hanging below her shoulders and green eyes peering out at him from a face carved from alabaster. Her clothing hid most of her figure, but even as she sat in the saddle he could tell she was tall for a woman, her knee-high boots and leather riding pants covering long legs.

Jonas suddenly realized how long it had been since he’d really stopped and looked at a woman. Even after four years locked away in Leavenworth, most of his thoughts had gone only to getting out. And in the past few days, events had moved so quickly, there hadn’t been much time to think about anything else. At West Point, and after the war, he had courted women as an eligible bachelor, but he’d never met anyone who really made him think about marriage or a life beyond the army. Now he stood twenty yards away from what he thought might clearly be the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life, and for a moment it was difficult to speak.

“Who are you?” he finally asked.

The woman stared at him. Her face was a curious mixture of fear and anxiety. It looked to him like she was wrestling with something: a problem so big the weight of it might crush her. It made Hollister want to help her. Take off his hat and hold it in his hands and ask her, like a Knight Errant might ask his queen how he could be of service.

She stared hard at him for several seconds.

“I am called Shaniah,” she said. Her voice was low and Hollister and Chee had to strain to hear her.

“What are you doing here?” Hollister asked.

She did not answer but pulled the cloak back over her head and reined the stallion around, giving him the quirt as she rode hard back the way she had come. Vanishing into the trees almost as mysteriously as she had arrived.

Hollister looked at Chee, who still seemed ready to jump on his horse and ride the woman down.

“Huh,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-nine

“M
onkey Pete, what does this train have in the way of maps of the territories?” Hollister asked the trainman.

After their encounter with the mysterious woman Shaniah, they had finished their inspection of Torson City, buried the three bodies and returned to Denver just after nightfall. Slater and his men had shadowed them all the way back, but had offered no interference.

“We’ve got all the maps you might need, Major,” Monkey Pete said. From a cabinet in the main car, he pulled several metal tubes and set them on the table in front of Hollister. They had finished their meal, and Jonas wanted to get moving. The encounter with the mystery woman had given him pause at first, but now it felt like he was closer to something, to finding what he was looking for.

Chee sat across the table from the major, quiet and lost in thought. He’d been like that since the woman appeared. Hollister was not surprised that Chee had been right. It had been a woman following them. He was beginning to learn that Chee was right most of the time. At least about Deathwalkers and mysterious women.

“Cheer up, Chee. You’ll get to shoot somebody soon,” Hollister said.

Dog lay on the floor of the car, theoretically asleep but his eyes slitted, always close to Chee.

Monkey Pete was fishing through the maps, finally settling on one, pulling the rolled paper from inside the metal tube, and unrolling it on the table in front of them.

“This is a Central and Pacific railroad map, Major. Printed just last month. It’s probably the most accurate and up to date of any. What is it you’re looking for?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. But something Declan’s kid kept saying is sticking in my craw,” Hollister said. “He kept saying, ‘mine,’ over and over. At first I thought he was talking about Torson City, then maybe something personal or a possession he’d lost there when those creatures attacked. Or he was referring to the men he lost. But now I wonder if he meant something else. Chee and I found blood down in the mine. Like maybe they ambushed those men.”

Hollister opened his copy of Van Helsing’s journal and went to a page he had dog-eared. “Dr. Van Helsing has some notes about ‘suspicious’ attacks out here. There’s a half dozen places where a group of people were murdered in the last six years, and it was put off as Indian massacres. He and Pinkerton weren’t sure that was the case.”

He thumbed through the diary, marking the locations on the map.

Hollister picked up a charcoal pencil and pored over the map, putting marks on Torson City, the spot in Wyoming where he’d lost his platoon, and where the half dozen attacks noted in the journal occurred. When he was finished, he was not surprised to find that three of the eight spots were mining camps. There had to be a connection.

“Van Helsing also thinks these things are mountain creatures by nature. They come from Eastern Europe, where I understand it’s very hilly, and the altitude doesn’t seem to bother them like it does us. If they were hiding out or had a remote home base, I expect it would be in the mountains somewhere.”

Curiously enough, the spots on the map made a rough circle from Torson City on the southern end to the spot in Wyoming just west of Deadwood where he’d been attacked. The circle was a few hundred miles in diameter.

“I don’t know, Major, that’s a lot of territory,” Chee said. “And what if some of those
were
Indian attacks? Makes it even harder to pin down.”

“I don’t disagree, Chee. I’m just trying to suss it out. One of the two places we know for sure they attacked was a mining camp. I’m wondering if there’s a reason for that.”

“What kind of reason?” Monkey Pete asked.

“I don’t know, but I remember something from when . . . from Wyoming, they don’t like moving around in the daylight. Van Helsing said enough sun is fatal to ’em. So they like the dark. What’s darker than a mine?”

“But there’s got be dozens of mines within that circle you’ve drawn. Maybe hundreds,” Monkey Pete said.

“True. But how many
abandoned
mines? That’s where I expect they’d be hiding. They wouldn’t be holed up in a working mine. Unless they’d killed or did what Van Helsing called ‘turned’ everyone working there first.”

“Turned?” Chee asked.

“I read it too,” Monkey Pete chimed in. “The creatures drink the victims’ blood first and then make the victims drink the creatures’ blood. Turns ’em into a vampire. I want you boys to promise me something . . . if them things ever gets a’holt of me and starts turnin’ Monkey Pete, you promise me you’ll shoot me dead.”

Hollister looked at the engineer, his face a curious mixture of surprise and some form of admiration for the man’s mind. “Sure Monkey Pete. You just promise me you’ll do the same to me.”

“Oh sure, Major, I’ll be happy to shoot you,” he said.

“But just to be clear, only if I’m being turned into a vampire. Not for any other reason,” Hollister said.

“We’ll see,” Monkey Pete said and turned his attention to the map again.

Chee shook his head. “It seems kind of thin, sir.”

“I don’t disagree. But we got nothing else. And these other attacks in mining camps makes it a connection, no matter how thin it might be,” Hollister said. “And I’ve been thinking, maybe when they attacked Declan’s group, they were hiding in the mine. The sun went down and out they came. If you can’t be in the sunlight, a mine is the perfect spot to spend the daylight hours. There are mines all over the west. Maybe this is how they’re moving and gathering a group large enough to make whatever move it is he has planned.”

Chee nodded. He had to agree, reluctant as he was. It made sense.

“Let me see that map,” Monkey Pete said.

He took it off the table and sat down with it at the desk. Making marks with the pencil, he muttered to himself as he worked. “I’ve driven trains for Mr. Pinkerton all over this territory. I may not know them all, but I can tell you a lot of the mines that have played out . . .” His words trailed off.

Jonas filled his coffee cup and looked across the table at Chee. The young man sat there looking all jangled up, like the weight of the world was on him.

“Something on your mind, Chee?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Chee answered.

“Chee, I told you about calling me ‘sir.’ Now we had a good first effort in the field today. You did good work out there. When I was in the army I wasn’t the type of officer who didn’t value input from his men. If you got something to say, I think you need to tell me. I don’t want to have to give an order.”

“The woman, sir,” Chee said.

“What about her?”

“She’s the key to this. I think we should try to capture her. If we want to find these things, she’s the one who can lead us to them.”

Hollister paused while he measured the young man’s words.

“Let’s say you’re right. Suppose this ‘Shaniah’ is part of this. How do you suggest we go about catching her?”

Chee shrugged.

“And if we do catch her, what if she turns out to be one of the creatures like you figure? I mean, she scattered them Utes in seconds, and God only knows how. She had her back to us, but I’m wondering if she didn’t show ’em her real face.”

“Her real face, sir?” Chee was curious.

“Yeah. Back in Wyoming, when they attacked my platoon, they came at us, and their faces . . . they change somehow. The eyes turn bright red and their jaws get long and they get these big-ass fangs coming out of their mouths. It’s enough to make you shit if you weren’t so worried about dying. Out there today, she kept her back to us the entire time she was facing down the Indians. I reckon this Shaniah showed the Utes her real face, and that’s what spooked ’em. They probably thought she was some kind of witch.”

Chee nodded. There was logic to the major’s words. And it did explain what happened when the woman appeared.

“So while I admire your initiative, I’m not so sure I think we’re ready to capture and control one of these things yet. Not until we learn a little bit more about them.”

Right then, Chee understood even more why Hollister had made such a good commander. He had taken Chee’s input, even encouraged it, and given it thorough consideration. And while he hadn’t outright rejected it, he had shown Chee the holes in his argument but had done so in a way so as not to discourage him. He had made a command decision. But he had included Chee in the process. Hollister was the kind of officer men fought for.

“Here we go,” Monkey Pete said from the desk. He rose and shuffled back to the table where the two men sat, spreading the map out.

“Inside your circle, Major, there’re six abandoned mining towns I know of.” All of them were on the Front Range of the Rockies, and spread from a point about one hundred and thirty miles north of Torson City all the way up into Wyoming. He pointed to each one.

“How many of them can we reach by train?” Hollister asked.

“These four should still have spurs,” the engineer said, pointing out the locations on the map. “The trains don’t run there no more, so I don’t know what shape the tracks will be in, but we can get close, I expect. But this one, the mine is closed but the town is still there. Train runs in once a week.”

Hollister looked at the first spot, a town called Absolution. It was a silver mine, nearly played out but, according to the map, still working. “This might be the place!” Hollister said. “If they want to turn people, wouldn’t this be the perfect place to start?”

A small number of people, controllable, and a mine for the daylight hours.

“It’s as good a place as any to start,” Chee said, nodding his head in agreement.

“Monkey Pete, how long to get there from Denver?” Hollister said.

Monkey Pete put his hand on his chin, calculating the amount of time it would take to be under way. “The horses are loaded up on the stock car. We’re ready to go. It’s a couple hundred miles to Absolution, and it’s about a seven percent grade. Even with our extra speed, it’ll take us most of the next day to get there. If we get started right away.”

“Well my good man, let’s see what this train has got. Get us going to Absolution and don’t spare the whip!” Hollister said.

He scurried off, happy to have his train running again.

Chee reached inside his shirt and fingered his medicine bag. He had a feeling he was going to need it. Something had bothered him ever since he and Hollister had ventured into the Torson City mine earlier. It was the bats. Chee knew that bats were night creatures. They wouldn’t normally leave their nests and fly out in the daylight unless they had to. The bats had swarmed out from deep in the mine. Something had scared them recently and when Hollister and Chee had ventured there, they were upset again, frightened enough to ignore instinct and fly out into the daylight sky.

Chee squeezed his medicine bag and wondered what that could be.