Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (10 page)

The beast’s shrill scream sounded like a train whistle as the shuriken cut into its chest, instantly stopping its heart. The beast itself lurched up on its back legs and twisted around before tumbling in a heap, quivering.

She couldn’t be sure it was a werewolf, but the way the shuriken had stopped it was a pretty good sign….

Angel picked up her Winchester. On one knee and looking around wildly for more beasts, she quickly loaded the Winchester with silver cartridges. Off in the darkness beyond the fire, the horses danced and nickered. Brush snapped, and faint snarls and mewls rose. They didn’t seem too close yet.

Angel racked a live round in the Winchester’s chamber, then
set the rifle aside and loaded her.45, plucking the silver cartridges from her shell belt without looking but keeping her eyes on the darkness beyond the fire. Quickly, she decided to make a run for it. Probably, the wolves would linger over the bodies of the dead hobgobbies, devour them first before they came after her. If they did, and if there were only five or six in the pack, she’d be able to hold them at bay with her rifle.

Having made up her mind, she holstered the Peacemaker, fastened the keeper thong over the hammer, grabbed her Winchester, and ran. She’d run about fifty feet before the snarling rose from the hobgobbies’ camp, and she could hear quick, padded feet moving toward her from both sides of the trail.

Shit.

She might have made the wrong decision.

She kept running as fast as she could on the treacherous terrain, holding the Winchester in her right hand, pumping her left arm. Her black Stetson blew off her head and flopped down her back by its horsehair chin thong.

A cold stone dropped in her chest when she heard the thuds of the running pack growing quickly louder, and she could hear the throaty, slathering snarls. She didn’t look back, knowing it would break her stride, but kept running until, when she sensed at least one beast getting too close, she stopped, swung around, dropped to a knee, and raised the Winchester to her shoulder.

A big wolf nearly as black as the night but limned in silver moonlight was twenty feet away and closing by fluid leaps and bounds. His eyes glowed yellow red. Angel raked the Winchester’s hammer back and fired.

The beast snarled and yipped, dropped, and rolled, piling up on itself four feet in front of Angel’s knees. She cut a glance
around, saw at least three more shadows bounding toward her from both sides of the trail, their strides now slowing in light of what had happened to the black.

“Come on, you bastards!” Angel shouted, angrily racking a fresh round into the chamber. “Come and get it!”

The shadows sort of hunkered low to the ground, making them hard to see even with the milky light radiating from a big, round moon hovering about a quarter of the way from its zenith and casting the night in an eerie twilight.

One of the silhouettes moved. Angel snapped a shot at it, heard the precious silver round spang off a rock. She ejected the cartridge, heard it clang onto the gravel behind her.

“Shit!”

Levering a fresh round into the chamber, she rose slowly and began backing away, sliding the rifle from right to left and back again. She couldn’t tell if the beasts were following her or not. When a werewolf had turned completely into a wolf and not some man-wolf amalgam, it was especially cunning and dangerous. These might be trying to get around her and cut her off.

That thought fired adrenaline into her veins. She twisted around, took the rifle in one hand once more, and broke into a full-ahead sprint. She’d seen a cave near the place where she’d tied her horse. If she could get in there, she could hold off the wolves till morning if she had to.

Liquid breaths rumbled in wolf lungs behind her. Padded feet thudded. Sage branches snapped and gravel crackled. She glanced over her shoulder, saw what must have been a whole dozen of the shadows lunging toward her, several pairs of eyes glowing fiercely in the moonlight.

She dug her heels into the ground, pushing harder, her heart
racing now, blood flowing hot through her veins. She ran past the place where she’d stumbled onto Leonora and Rubio fucking, and followed a path down a steep incline. The wolves were on both sides of her now. One was lunging toward her so quickly he almost appeared to be slowing so he wouldn’t overtake her. Another was coming hard on the other side, fangs showing pale between gaping jaws.

Angel wanted to stop and shoot but she couldn’t. Something told her that if she did that, she’d be dead almost instantly. Even if she got one of the beasts, the others would be on her in seconds.

“Oh, Christ,” she heard herself nearly sob aloud.

She should have stayed by the fire.

Ahead was the sand-bottomed draw she’d crossed on her way to the hobgobbies’ lair. The wolves would get her down there. The deep sand would slow her. She glanced once more over her shoulder. One was so close to her now that she could smell the rancid stench of his breath, see the foam flecking from his jaws as he breathed.

Angel bolted into the draw. A strange resignedness overtook her as she felt the deep sand grabbing at her boots, slowing her.

On the draw’s opposite bank, she glimpsed something that she only vaguely registered as odd. A hatted figure silhouetted against the sky hunkered over something that appeared mounted high up off the ground and that flashed like gold sequins in the lunar light.

At the same time that she recognized the bullet-crowned hat, she heard a man’s voice shout, “Down, Red!”

Angel probably would have gone down, anyway, as the sticky hands of the sand were grabbing at her heels. She hit the draw,
rolled, and buried her face in the sand as a great cacophony shattered the night’s bizarre silence.

Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

Beneath the din, wolves yelped and yowled. A furry, rancid-smelling body hit the ground beside Angel and rolled beyond her until it piled up against the base of the draw’s opposite bank. She heard the thuds of several others, and the wild thrashing of brush as a couple of the wounded tried to crawl away.

When the gun had hammered away for nearly twenty seconds, Angel lifted her head and glanced up to see the flash of the revolving maws and the quicksilver of its bullets streaking out over her head and off across her backtrail.

After another fifteen or so seconds, the din died suddenly, leaving only swirling echoes growing softer and softer, as though the moon were swallowing them piecemeal.

The gun blazed once more, causing Angel to jerk with a start and again mash her cheek against the sand, watching her backtrail with one eye. Several more streaks of silver flashed across the draw.

A final, agonized yip rose. A body thumped to the ground.

After a few more seconds the Gatling gun fell silent.

On the chill night air, Angel smelled the coppery stench of hot, flowing blood.

The silence was broken by a scratching sound. Angel gained her knees as she looked up the bank before her. The silhouetted figure crouched over the smoking Gatling gun mounted in its open casket, touched a match to a cigarette protruding straight out from between his lips.

Blowing gray smoke, Uriah Zane said, “Damn, that’s a lot of ’em.”

Angel drew a deep breath, the blood only just now beginning to slow in her veins. The terror was still there, but it was mixed with embarrassment and an automatic defiance. “I hope you’re not thinking I needed your help, Uriah.”

“Oh, no,” Zane said, a ghostly silhouette smoking atop the casket. “They were just about to turn tail and run in the other direction.”

Chapter 10
    

“NOT YOU, TOO, URIAH!”

When Angel said nothing, only stared up in anger and with a sickening feeling of humiliation at the giant wolf-killer towering over her, Zane gave a disgusted grunt, leaped out of the casket, and strode down the slope to drop to one knee beside her, puffing his cigarette. “Where you hurt?”

“My pride.”

“Fool woman.”

She could smell the musky horse-and-sage scent of him as he bored his gaze into her, blowing smoke in her face. Only vaguely did she admit to herself that she was relieved to see him, that, in fact, she wanted to throw her arms around him and bury her face in his chest. It wouldn’t do for him to know that, however. She’d never been a damsel in distress, and even though she’d come to within inches of being wolf bait, she wasn’t about to start now. There was a bone-deep need in her to be
respected…especially by Uriah Zane, for some damn stupid reason.

Not going easy on her, he said, “What in blue blazes are you doin’ out here on a full moon?”

Tears of fury oozed from her eyes, and she felt a great convulsion in her throat. A wave of rage as well as frustration and befuddlement exploded within her, snuffing expressible words from her racing thoughts and emotions. How was it only Uriah Zane could make her—
her
, a deputy federal marshal, and a damn good one!—feel like a silly, little, pigtailed schoolgirl hysterical over a harmless spider crawling across the floor?

“Fuck you, Zane!”

The ghoul hunter snorted. “Don’t take nothin’ for granted. Where ya hurt? And don’t mince words. We ain’t got all night. I’m out of silver bullets for the cannon yonder, and I don’t doubt other spooks are on the way.”

Angel heaved herself to her feet, wincing at the pain shooting up her leg from her right ankle, which she couldn’t put much weight on. She glared at Zane, who straightened his big frame that stood about five inches over hers, the quirley dangling from a corner of his mouth. He was the only man she felt physically dominated by, and she hated that about him despite being so infernally attracted to him. “I made a mistake. Leave me alone, damn you.”

He stared at her in fatherly admonition, and she found herself averting her gaze from his and giving in a little. “I twisted my ankle.” She lifted her arms, saw that her elbows were bloody and sandy. “Scraped my elbows.”

“That it?”

“Yes, that’s it,” she returned scornfully. “You asked, and I told you. Sorry my throat’s not cut.”

“The night’s still young.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Gonna help you up.”

He gave a grunt, and then suddenly she was in his arms, snaking her hands around his neck with a gasp. As though she weighed no more than a straw stock, he carried her up the side of the ravine and set her down on a rock beside the wheeled casket, the Gatling gun jutting up from it.

Zane’s horse, General Lee, glanced at her over his shoulder and gave his tail a swish in greeting. Tendrils of white smoke were still unraveling from the machine gun’s six nasty maws.

“It’s not worth all that,” she said, feeling the heat emanating from the Gatling gun beside her. At least, she thought the heat was coming from the gun. She had a soft feeling in her belly as she watched him standing before her, his broad-shouldered frame silhouetted against the moon. His long, coal-black hair hung down from his bullet-crowned sombrero to flow over the shoulders of his wolfskin vest. “I could have walked, saved you a backache. How’d you know I was out here?”

He crouched, picked up her right foot, wrapping his hands around the boot and pressing slightly against her ankle. “Lomax in Gunnison said you were looking for me.”

The truth was he hadn’t planned on searching for her till the next morning. But he hadn’t been able to keep her off his mind, so after a few beers and whiskey shots with Junius Webb in the Ace of Diamonds in Gunnison, he’d paid the old prospector his share of the bounty gold, retrieved General Lee from the livery stable—the horse had enjoyed sufficient rest, water, and feed—and headed out well before sunset.

As the pain shot up into her shin, Angel winced and dug her
fingers into the rock she was sitting on. “Figured you was on the grub line again and might need a job. I lost Curry two days ago.”

Zane straightened and started walking away from her into the brush and low, rocky buttes. “I’ll fetch your horse. You hear any more wolves, give a holler.”

Angel barely heard that last, because he was just then disappearing through a notch between the buttes, moving as soundlessly as a jungle tiger in his high-topped fur moccasin boots from the tops of which bowie knives jutted.

“How did you find me
here
?” she called after him, receiving no reply. “I mean, this is big country, Uriah…”

She sat there, angry again and feeling frightened because he’d left her and hating the feeling, because she was a marshal, goddamnit, and she had no business fawning over the likes of some unheeled wolf killer.

Damn Lomax for letting Zane know she’d inquired about him. She must have been drunk. When he was around she sometimes lost her confidence, found herself feeling dependent on his admittedly superior hunting and tracking skills, and that graveled her no end.

“Seen your horse,” Zane said later, when he’d retrieved Angel’s paint mustang, and they were heading along a faint Indian trail to some cabin where the wolfer had said they’d find safety from the creatures of the full moon.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Seen your horse.”

“I got that much, Uriah. You saw my horse.”