The Graves at Seven Devils (9 page)

“I reckon I can overlook it if you get down here real quick.”

She knelt before him and threw her arms around his neck. He wrapped his own arms around her waist, pulled her taut against him, and kissed her hungrily, relishing the feel of the girl once more, the smell of her, the taste of her tongue, the silky feel of her ripe, full lips under his.

Her breasts pushed flat against his chest, the nipples pebbling. She sighed and shuddered as she ran her hands brusquely through his hair and returned his penetrating kiss.

Prophet held her for a long time, kissing her, running his right hand down her arm, across the swell of her hip to the long curve of her thigh, sculpted and tightened by all the miles she'd stretched out behind her. Then he gentled her onto the ground, and she spread her legs, sighing deeply as he positioned himself between her knees and, mindful of his injured groin, eased himself down.

“Oh, Lou,” she groaned.

 

They made love desperately, hungrily, and then again more slowly, with Louisa on top, rising and falling on her haunches, full breasts sloping out from her chest as she rocked. They shuddered together in a fury of spent love, and Louisa leaned forward to squeeze the hard slabs of his chest. She sandwiched his face between her hands and nibbled his right ear.

“That felt
good
,” she breathed.

At length, she lifted her head and peered into his eyes, her own hazel eyes slightly crossing as the skin above the bridge of her nose wrinkled with beseeching. “Come with me to Arizona, Lou. Let's start a new life together.”

Prophet lifted his head, frowning. “Together? What the hell's come over you?”

“Don't get your shorts in a twist.” Louisa stretched her body out atop his, like a cat stretching on a window ledge. She hooked her feet around his shins and rubbed her cheek against his chest. “I'm not proposing we get married and raise kids and join a church, and all that other stuff you're so afraid of. I just think you should give some thought to settling down. We could do it together.”

“I have thought about it,” Prophet said, slowly running his hands down her slender, naked back. “Decided against it. Now, that don't mean you shouldn't. I been tellin' you since I first met you that bounty hunting is no job for a girl. You need to settle down, get hitched to a nice boy, raise some kids, and join a church. But me?” He chuckled as he stared at the slowly fading sky. “Hell, this is all I know.”

“It doesn't have to be.”

“You can't teach an old dog new tricks nor a skunk not to spray. Besides, I got that agreement—”

“Oh, I know about your blasphemous contract with ‘Ole Scratch.'” Louisa rested her chin on his breastbone and absently caressed his arms, which he'd crossed behind his head. “That demon doesn't need you shoveling coal throughout eternity any more than you need to spend the rest of your life bounty hunting just so you can drink and carouse to your heart's content. You're not getting any younger. And that incident with the old lady—”

“Whoa, now!” Prophet looked down at her. “That was an isolated mistake. I had distractions.”

“I saw the distractions, and they didn't look all that distracting, if you ask me.”

“Nobody asked you. Forget it. I got a contract with Scratch, and I aim to keep it. But like I said, I'm glad you're settling down. What family you got down there?”

“A cousin. I heard about Marlene through another cousin I ran into up in Dakota last fall. Marlene Karlaufsky
was
her name. I think her married name's Fletcher or some such. She and I were close as girls back in Nebraska, before her father pulled up stakes and moved the family to Denver. I wrote her a letter down in Arizona, just trying to reestablish contact with her, trying to find out how she was. She wrote back inviting me to go live with her and her husband and her boy.”

Louisa gently twisted one of Prophet's chest hairs, keeping her chin planted on his breastbone, and nibbled her lower lip. “At first, I didn't cotton to the idea. But then I got to thinking, why not? I've been tracking badmen for nearly three years now, and it hasn't brought my folks back. And it hasn't done anything to silence their voices I hear in my head every night before I go to sleep. Maybe it never will.”

Prophet sighed. “What's your cousin do down there in Seven Devils?”

“Raises chickens and takes in sewing. She said I could work for her a year or two, earn some money. Then maybe I'll open a shop of some kind.”

“Hell,” Prophet said, chuckling, suppressing a sudden pang of jealousy and lonesomeness. “You go down there and settle down, Louisa girl, you'll be married inside of a year.”

She rolled her eyes up at him. “You think so?”

“I'd bet the plow horse on it.”

“If you drifted down there with me, you maybe could deputy for Marlene's husband. He's the town sheriff.”

“I wore a badge once . . . for the last time.” It had been an awful mistake, and Prophet wasn't sure how he'd come to represent the law in that little Wyoming town, but he'd woken up one morning with a thunderous hangover in bed with a pretty, painted harpy to find a badge pinned to his shirt and the whole town congratulating him on his new employ. “Them badges might be only a half ounce of cheap tin, but they weigh a ton.”

“You could bartend or help out in the livery barn. . . .”

“Well, hell, I'm sure I could shovel shit off the street, too.” Prophet eased Louisa off his shoulder and grabbed his longhandles, which the high mountain air had nearly dried. “But I think I'll keep doin' what I know best, thank you very much, Miss Bonaventure.”

“Oh, Lou!”

Prophet had stuffed one leg into his longhandles. He glanced at her and froze, an ice pick of raw desire tickling his loins.

She lay belly down in the short, wiry grass, kicking her feet up over her round, firm bottom. Her tender pink nipples caressed the ground, and her fingers tore absently at the grass. Her hair caressed her pale, delicate shoulders. “At least ride down to Seven Devils with me, won't you? I've been lonely and—I'll admit it—hungry for your attentions.”

She met his stare and lifted her mouth corners slightly, eyes slitting devilishly, her bee-stung lips seeming to swell. She crossed her ankles and curled her toes. “We'll have a good time, Lou. I promise.”

MARIE ANTOINETTE FLETCHER, lying spread-eagle atop a bed on the second floor of the only whorehouse in Seven Devils, struggled against the torn strips of bed-sheet tying her wrists and ankles to the bed's four mahogany posts.

It was to this room the men and the girl who'd killed her family had taken her, a couple of them carrying her, kicking and screaming, over their shoulders. When they'd gotten to the room, they'd slapped her until her cheeks and lips burned and her ears rang, and then they'd tied her to the bed and begun taking turns, while she heard above the ringing in her ears and the squawk of the bedsprings the screams and wails of the other women in the building being similarly abused.

She'd heard the screech and witchlike cackle of the young, demonic redhead with the green streaks in her hair—someone had called her “Cora”—a couple of rooms down the hall. And there had been one sudden gunshot that seemed to jerk the walls and make the rafters sag and that, when the echo had died, had caused Cora to laugh even harder while one of the working girls pleaded and begged for mercy.

Now the man called Captain Sykes climbed off her, grinning down at her through his close-cropped red beard. He slapped her naked thigh and spoke with a Yankee twang. “Thanks, milady. I feel much better now. Been a while, don't ya know.” He winked, then turned and rolled off the bed to begin gathering his clothes.

“When you ride with the Three of a Kind Gang,” he continued thickly, blinking his red-rimmed eyes as if to clear them as he reached for his longhandles, “you don't get much time for pleasures of the flesh.”

While he had toiled on top of her, Marie Antoinette had loosened the knot in the strip of cloth tying her right hand to the bedpost. She was sure that one fierce jerk would free the hand entirely. As the red-bearded man stumbled around drunkenly, gathering his clothes from the floor right of the bed, she eyed the small-caliber revolver he'd dropped when he'd first staggered into the room from downstairs and began shucking out of his clothes.

She was sure he hadn't realized he'd dropped the gun, which seemed to have fallen from an inside pocket of his long, black greatcoat and rolled across the red Moroccan throw rug to half conceal itself beneath the nightstand beside the bed. In his drunken state, he might not notice it down there. Marie Antoinette was counting on that. The only thing that mitigated the horror of the past hour—having seen her son and her husband both gunned down before she'd been hauled off to the whorehouse and repeatedly beaten and violated—had been the prospect of getting her hands on that gun.

Unconsciously, she'd buried her shock and incomprehensible misery beneath a razor-edged blade of raw fury, which she'd so far contained. She hoped she could continue to contain it until the drunken lieutenant had left, and she could free the other ties and grab the weapon.

Marie Antoinette, who had once worked in this very house of ill repute before she'd married Fletcher, had been around guns enough to know that the revolver was only a five-shot. A backup pistol. That mattered little. The point was, it was a gun, and with it she could kill at least five of the six savages who'd murdered her boy and her husband.

“Ah, shit!” Sykes barked as, pulling on his trousers, he lost his balance, stumbled sideways, and fell to the floor with a loud thud. “Shit!” Then he chuckled and glanced up at Marie Antoinette staring down at him, expressionless. “That wasn't very damn graceful. Please accept my apologies, milady!”

Marie Antoinette's eyes flicked toward the gun, the ivory handle of which protruded two inches out from beneath the nightstand. Sykes's left elbow lay atop the rug only two feet from the gun. Marie Antoinette tightened her jaws nervously.

Don't look at the gun,
she silently ordered the man.
Do not look at the gun. . . .

As though defying her, Sykes turned his head toward the nightstand, his chin down, heavy-lidded eyes angled toward the floor.

Marie Antoinette bit her lower lip.
Shit, shit, shit!

But then he raked a heavy hand across his face, turned to his left, and pushed himself up off the floor. “There we go!” He stood and inhaled deeply, glancing once more at Marie Antoinette and holding up his hands, palms out. “Quite the feat, wouldn't you say? Now, if I can only stay upright long enough to finish gatherin' my damn clothes. Who in the hell threw them around like this, anyway?
You
?”

He laughed again as he reached down to continue pulling up his pants. “No, I reckon you couldn't have done it, could ya?”

Marie Antoinette lay as if on pins and needles as the man stumbled around, dressing. She prayed he wouldn't see the gun or feel it missing from his coat.

When he'd finally pulled on his greatcoat, plopped his blue cavalry hat on his head backward, and staggered toward the door, she glanced once more at the gun.

It still lay beneath the nightstand.

“Never did the mattress dance with a lawman's wife before,” Sykes drawled. He winked as he reached for the door handle. “Next time, you might put forth a little more effort.”

With that, he fumbled the door open and stumbled into it before staggering out, leaving the door standing wide behind him. Sykes's boots scuffed along the hall while the drunkenly jubilant voices of the other renegades rose from the parlor below, as did the occasional angry admonition of the whorehouse madam, Miss Kate.

As Sykes's foot thuds dwindled into the distance, Sykes now humming loudly, Marie Antoinette bunched her lips and gave her right wrist a vicious tug. The knot gave with a tearing sound and a faint wooden crack.

Panting anxiously, Marie Antoinette swung around and tore at the left-hand knot with her right thumb and index finger. That knot was tighter than the other, but she worked at it desperately, gritting her teeth and ignoring the ache and burn in her nails, which she cracked and tore as she worked open the knot.

She kept her ears pricked for more approaching renegades. Thank God they all seemed to be singing and dancing in the downstairs parlor with a couple of Miss Kate's unfortunate working girls.

Finally, Marie Antoinette's left hand fell free. She wasted no time, using both hands, going to work on her ankles, listening intently to the sounds from below and the murmurs from a room down the hall, and casting quick, tense looks at the door standing open before her. She half expected at any moment to spy another gang member approaching the room.

When she had her second ankle free of the post, she scrambled off the bed so quickly that she nearly fell. Catching herself, she reached down, scooped up the revolver, and set it atop the nightstand. Then she grabbed her dress, which the savages had torn off her, and donned it as best she could, with half the back buttons missing.

Picking up the gun, holding it in both hands straight out before her, gritting her teeth against the pain of her rage hammering away at her skull—were her son and husband really dead or had this all been some hideous nightmare?—she moved to the door. She drew the pistol's hammer straight back with her right thumb and, swallowing, her chest rising and falling heavily, edged a cautious look into the hall.

Finding it empty, she turned right and began stepping slowly, barefoot, toward the top of the stairs at the hall's far end. She'd been so intent on the gun that she hadn't realized that her lips were smashed and at that one eye was swelling up, but now she felt the blood running down her chin. She blinked to keep the blood from a cut brow from her right eye.