Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (23 page)

Zane added his Henry and LeMat to the fusillade, and when both guns pinged on vacant chambers, he emptied one of his Colts. Before he’d fired his last pistol bullet, the Gatling clicked empty. Hathaway had emptied his own rifle and two pistols and had leaped down off the boulder to reload behind it.

Through the sunlit smoke haze, Zane saw a hobgobbie poke its hatted head with its long, stringy hair out from behind a
boulder. The hobgobbie gritted its tobacco-crusted teeth as it snapped off a shot. Before the one remaining ghoul could thumb his pistol’s hammer back, Zane triggered his second Colt.

The ghoul’s head snapped back as though he’d been hit in the face with a hammer. He dropped onto his back, flopped around, and gradually fell as still as all the others slouched beneath the wafting smoke, their pooling blood glistening like the skin of rotten lemons.

Angel rose from behind the hot Gatling, grabbing her rifle.

Hathaway looked down the slope from behind his boulder for a time, turning his head this way and that as he surveyed the carnage. Finally, he turned his broad, sweating, coffee-colored face with its black beard and wide brown eyes toward Zane and grinned.

“Looks like you got crossways with a hobgobbie camp.”

“Somethin’ like that.” Zane started reloading and looked at Angel. “I thought you’d rode on.”

Angel turned to him as she plucked shells from her cartridge belt and thumbed them through her Winchester’s loading gate. “Ran into three other o’ them demons along the trail. Drunk as lords, and when they saw me an’ Al, they went into a frenzy and came at us shooting. They were heading this direction, so…”

She shrugged, jerked her charro jacket down at her waist and stared down the slope before her, one fist on her hip.

Zane rose slowly. He, too, was reloading his weapons, but his mind was elsewhere. “Bastards killed Alejandro,” he said tightly, almost under his breath, wanting to kill every hobgobbie he could plant his sights on. “Just an old padre, wasn’t botherin’ no one.”

“Yeah, they do that,” Hathaway said with a fateful sigh. “Ghouls hate men o’ the cloth in partic’lar.”

The stocky scout wagged his bearded face sadly as he started down the slope to kick around among the bodies and to shoot any that had a glimmer of life left in them.

While Angel and Hathaway headed off to find a secure night camp, for the sun had dropped behind the western ridges, Zane returned to Padre Alejandro. He used his considerable strength to lift and twist the cross out of the ground. Then he pulled the spikes out of the priest’s lifeless limbs, and wrapped the man in the altar cloth he’d found in the church.

It was nearly dark by the time the ghoul hunter, working bare-chested, sweating in spite of the cooling air, had dug the grave, gentled the blanket-wrapped priest into the dark hole, and covered him. He took extra time to erect a crude cross of pine branches and rawhide.

When he’d finished the chore of running down Charlie Hondo’s bunch, he’d return and erect a chiseled stone. Doubtless the priest would scoff at such ostentation. Zane had never known anyone simpler or more self-effacing, but the padre would have to indulge the ghoul hunter. He could think of no words to say over the mounded dirt and the rocks he’d gathered to ward off predators. The stone would be his attempt at compensating the priest for the lack. Whether the old man wanted it or not, Padre Alejandro deserved something to mark his passing and the sanctified ground in which he would lie forever.

In a cellar in the padre’s shack, Zane found the padre’s cache of silver bullets. There were several hundred freshly milled slugs
laid out in a bed of dried moss. Zane knew the padre had molded them for him, so he took the entire peach crate filled with the precious cartridges that likely would have cost him upward of a thousand dollars on the open market, if he’d been able to find any, as silver was always in short supply.

Nearly an hour later, he found Angel and Hathaway’s camp in a dry arroyo sheathed in stone escarpments and cedars, a good half mile off Hondo’s trail. The camp was relatively secure, if there was such a thing, from hobgobbies or the wandering bands of Indian swillers this country was known for, as many Arizona Apaches sought out the swillers’ curse for the gift of everlasting life and the unearthly powers over the white man.

Angel killed a couple of jackrabbits with her shurikens and chopped them up with her silver Spanish dagger. Hathaway, an ex–camp cook, took over from there, throwing together a surprisingly flavorful stew from the rabbits and several handfuls of wild herbs and roots he’d gathered from the banks of the arroyo. They dined hungrily, washing the food down with whiskey-laced coffee.

When they’d cleaned their plates and brewed another pot of coffee, Angel offered to sew up Zane’s bullet-burned right side.

The ghoul hunter reluctantly agreed. It wasn’t a serious wound, but he could feel the sporadic discomfort of the oozing blood under his clothes.

“I’ll be damned,” Angel said, kneeling beside him and dabbing at the cut with a cloth she’d soaked from her canteen. “Looks like it’s already started to heal.”

“Wasn’t much in the first place.”

“I beg to differ. Looks like the slug ricocheted off a rib.” She touched her finger to the bloody furrow. Zane felt only a slight
numbness there, no pain. He shrugged but did not look at Angel, feeling the heat of her incredulous gaze on his face.

Hathaway refilled his coffee cup from the pot in the fire and glanced at Zane’s side. “I’ll be damned. It does look to be healin’.” The scout chuckled deep in his chest and lifted his cup, taking a sip. “You must be part werewolf. Imagine that—a werewolf huntin’ werewolves.”

He chuckled again, pulled a blanket coat on over his bare arms. “I’ll take the first watch from atop one o’ them scarps over yonder. Who wants me to wake ’em in a few hours for the next hitch?”

Zane stared into the darkness beyond the throbbing firelight. “I’ll take it.”

“All right, then.” Coffee in one hand, rifle in the other, Hathaway strode off in his drag-heeled, bull-legged fashion.

When he was gone, neither Zane nor Angel said anything while she finished cleaning the wound. She said when she’d threaded her needle, “Probably doesn’t need this—looks like it’ll be all healed up by morning, but I reckon I might as well finish what I started.”

Then she pinched the skin along the furrow together, and began sewing the wound closed.

Zane stared into the darkness across the fire and sipped his whiskey-laced coffee, feeling nothing except for a gentle tug beneath his arm as she poked the needle through. When she finished, she lowered her head to cut the catgut with her teeth, then pressed her forehead against the ghoul hunter’s shoulders.

She held her head there for a time. He felt the warmth of her skin against his. She wrapped her arms around his bare waist
and pressed her forehead more firmly against his shoulder. She laced her fingers together, and squeezed him hard against her.

“Goddamn you, Uriah.”

He felt a tug low in his belly. His blood surged. He turned to her, wrapped an arm around her, and lifted her chin. She stared back at him obliquely, lines cutting across her forehead, but she did not resist him when he pressed his lips to hers.

She rose a little on her haunches, pressing her lips firmly against his, opening them, lifting her arms from his waist to wrap them around his neck and squirm against him, mashing her chest against his. He felt the swell of her breasts behind the soft calfskin vest, and his heart beat faster. He was a little surprised when, driven by a hard desire, he drew her onto his lap and kissed her more passionately, and closed a hand over her right breast, kneading it gently through the vest, and still she did not resist him.

She groaned and placed her own hand over his.

Finally, she heaved herself to her knees and, staring at him with dewy eyes, quickly began untying the vest’s rawhide drawstrings. Zane kicked out of his boots, waggled out of his buckskin breeches, and removed his own sweaty tunic and long handles.

He watched her stand and undress heatedly before him. Neither one said anything. Angel slowly revealed her delightfully rounded, full-breasted body to him, succulent hips swelling out from a belly nearly as taut as Zane’s own. When she stood before him naked, she swept her hat off brusquely, and her hair fell in a sexy, dark red mess across her shoulders, red strands curling up from beneath her arms to lick at her swollen, pink-tipped orbs.

She slid her hair back from her cheeks and dropped to her knees before him, one hand pulling at his hard, jutting shaft, the other sliding through the thick, black, sweat-damp mop of his hair. She pushed him back against the ground, and straddled him hungrily, grunting, whispering, “Goddamn you, Uriah….”

Chapter 22
    

“HOW’D IT HAPPEN?”

Angel rose up and down on her knees for a time, straddling Zane, groaning and kneading the hard, bulging slabs of his pectorals. The firelight illuminated faint copper streaks in her hair. Her narrowed jade eyes smoldered at him as the firelight shunted across her naked body, her jostling breasts casting shadows across her belly and ribs.

He held her hips in his strong hands, moving as she moved, up and down, until she leaned down, pressed her breasts against his chest, and kissed him, moving her head and stabbing her tongue deep into his mouth. He gave a groan and rolled her over, then propped himself on his outstretched arms and hammered against her—hard, even thrusts.

He lifted his head, fought back the impulse to loose a howl. The blood ran hot in him.

She rolled her head from side to side, pulled at his hair,
tugged at his ears, his beard. She dug her heels into the backs of his legs, her knees flopping like wings, and closed her eyes and turned her head to one side. She arched her back, bucking up hard to meet his wild thrusts, closing her upper teeth over her lower lip, sobbing and groaning.

“Oh… Jesus…
God
…!”

They’d lain together enough times to know when the other was ready. She opened her eyes and stared up at him meaningfully as she wrapped her hands around his corded forearms, from which the veins stood out in sharp relief against his sweat-damp skin bronzed by the firelight. She frowned up at him, puzzled.

“Stop, Uriah,” she whispered, caressing his arms with her hands.

He hadn’t heard her above the thunder of the blood in his ears.

“Uriah!” she said, looking frightened now, lifting her head.

Zane forced himself to stop hammering against her. He ground his teeth and lowered his chin hard, clutching at the ground on either side of her, and withdrawing his pelvis from hers. It was like trying to stop a Baldwin locomotive on a steep downgrade under full steam.

She scuttled down until her head was below his belly, and he closed his eyes tightly, grinding his teeth, as she finished him with her mouth.

It took a long time. She writhed beneath his belly, making choking sounds.

He rolled over onto his back and she rested her head upon his chest.

“Jesus,” she said raggedly, running her arm across her mouth and trying to catch her breath.

They lay there for a long time, entangled, Zane running his fingers through the silky strands of her hair, until he felt a wetness on his chest. He glanced down at her, saw tears dribbling out of her squeezed-shut eyes. One rolled down across the hooked scar on her cheek and into the hollow of his breastbone, showing gold in the firelight.

After a long time, she pushed off of him, slowly gained her feet, and gathered her clothes and myriad weapons including the silver Spanish sword. When she had them all in her arms, she set them down beside the fire, and, facing the flames, her back to Zane, she slowly dressed. When she had everything on except her boots and her hat, she tossed a piñon log on the fire, walked over to the other side of the blaze, and lay down in her blanket roll, resting her head back against her saddle.

Zane stood up and also dressed, before walking off in the brush beyond the fire to evacuate his bladder. He came back, refilled his coffee cup, splashed some whiskey into the hot brew, kicked out of his boots, and got out his hide makings sack. He lay back against his saddle with a weary sigh. Troughing a wheat paper between the first two fingers of his right hand, he dribbled chopped tobacco into it.

Angel’s voice came quietly from the other side of the fire. “How did it happen?”

Zane didn’t speak for a time as he slowly built the quirley. “You know that old stage robber Alden Woodyard?”

She nodded, staring up at the sky, not looking at him.

“After tracking him for five days north of Laramie, I ran him down in a box canyon in the Big Horns. Moved into his camp one night. There was a full moon. I shouldn’t have been out there, but I wanted to run him to ground before he met up with the rest of
his gang. He lured me in, leaped on me from a rock, and tore that hunk out of my back before I drilled a silver slug through his heart.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. She just stared up at the night sky. The firelight played across her hair. The fire cracked and sputtered.