Wicked Prayer (6 page)

“They’ll be a real pair, huh, Ky?” the man said. “Cavalry Man with his gimpy leg, and Pocahontas with both eyes carved out of her head. Talk about the blind leadin’ the lame. Or is that the lame leadin’ the blind?”

The woman just shrugged and reached under her leather coat, pulling out a wicked-looking knife. Dan recognized it immediately—a Mountain Clan Crow blade in a leather sheath tanned to a dull sheen with willow bark and birch oil. It had come from the Spirit Song Trading Post.

Kyra slipped the knife free and ran a thumb over the long, curved blade. “Sorry about your sweetheart, cowboy,” she said. “But that little girl’s got a couple things I need. They’re blue. They’re pretty. And right now they don’t see a thing.”

Dan stared up at the strangers. The three words he’d wanted to say to Leti were trapped inside his heart like burning coals, and there was no way he could get them out. Not now. Maybe not ever.

Only one word crossed his lips now:
“Why?"

“That’s the same thing your girlfriend asked.” The woman laughed. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told her—your girl’s an Indian, right?”

“Yes. But what difference does that make—?”

“I’ll save you the trouble of asking, stud: no, we’re not on some kind of trans-American ethnic-cleansing road trip, like your girlfriend thought. You see, I knew your woman’s bloodlines before I ever got here. Fact is, it was a shrunken head who led me to the doorstep of Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin. She’s just what I need. Her daddy was a white Irish-American, and her mama was a full-blooded Mountain Clan Crow. And when those two got together . . . bang! A blue-eyed Crow!”

“Do we have the luck of the Irish or
what?”
The man called Johnny laughed. “Turns out that a blue-eyed Crow is just what the witch doctor ordered.”

Crazy,
Dan thought
.
They're goddamned maniacs
—

Behind them, Dan heard a sudden movement.

Footsteps on broken glass.

Kyra whipped around, gun in hand, but her pistol was empty. “Get away from him,” Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin said over a raised shotgun barrel, “and drop your motherfucking guns before I blow both your heads clean off”

Church stared. The little Crow bitch with the blue eyes stood in the doorway of the Spirit Song Trading Post, a sawed-off pump action shotgun with a pistol grip clutched tightly in her hands. Damned if she didn’t look like she knew how to use it, too.

Church grit his teeth. The bitch shouldn’t even have been
conscious.
The way he’d clocked her, he’d pretty much written her off. But here she was. Eyes wild, blood-matted hair gleaming on the side of her head . . . and with a shotgun.

He glanced at Kyra.

She nodded slightly.

“Okay,” Kyra said. “You win.”

She made a show of tossing her pistol. It arced through the night sky, a flash in the dark, then skidded across the pavement like a stone skipping across an asphalt sea.

The sound of steel scraping pavement distracted Leticia for a split second—only a second. But it turned out that one second was all that Johnny Church—the man with the perfect reflexes and perfect smile—required.

In that second, Church raised his .357 and squeezed the trigger.

The Magnum recoiled in his hand, spitting its own special brand of venom.

He blew Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin right out of her moccasins.

“I didn’t want her dead," Kyra said.

“I didn’t see much choice.” Church scratched his blond crew cut with the barrel of his .357. “Looked like a
her or us
kinda situation to me.”

Kyra stood there ... a silent, indecisive moment beneath cold white shards of moonlight. Then: “You’re right, Johnny. But
alive
would have made this a lot easier. Now we have to worry about the Crow getting its claws on her.”

“Can’t you drop some mojo on her body or somethin’?” Church asked. “I mean, you got the power, right?”

Kyra sighed, threw her head back, closed her eyes, and let that cold white moonlight seep into her. She stood that way for a long moment, until the light slashed to her core and set her at ease.

It was true. She did have power. She knew many secrets, wanted to know many more. She had sacrificed for the knowledge she had gained. She had pushed herself to the brink of human endurance and beyond, past the point where scorpion venom was a danger, past the point where any kind of pain was a negative, but she wasn’t satisfied, nowhere close to it, because she knew there was more out there waiting for her, power others didn’t dare dream about—

“Ky?” Johnny said. “Did you hear me? I mean, you
can
handle this, can’t you?”

Kyra sighed. Sometimes Johnny drove her crazy. Sometimes he seemed like a kid’s action figure. All muscle, no mentality. But she didn’t have time for complaints. Not now. Composing herself, she opened her eyes and stared at Johnny Church.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve got more than a little mojo. And I
will
work up something. I don’t know
what the
fuck I’ll work up, but I’ll work it up. I didn’t want any complications tonight, though. I just wanted to get what we came for and hit the open highway.”

“So let’s do it.”

“It’s not that easy,” Kyra said. “It’s not like I’m Buffy the fucking Vampire Slayer or Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I can’t just wiggle my nose. These things . . . take time. Energy. A subtle
alignment
of supernatural forces. A certain
quietude
of surroundings—”

“Yeah, well,
quietude of surroundings
—or whatever the fuck
they call it on those New Age meditation tapes of yours—is a little luxury we don’t have, Ky. This place may
seem
like a secluded piece of nowhere, but I’ll tell you this: in the desert, sound travels for miles. Screams travel, too. So do gunshots. You can bet your boots that the local Eastwood will hop on his horse and slap leather mighty quick, little missy.”

Kyra stared down at the knife. Johnny Church may not have been right about a lot, but he was right about this. There was no time to attend to the Crow bitch now.

“We got us a job to do,” Johnny said. “We’re burning moonlight.”

Kyra didn’t say a word.

After all, they did have a job to do.

“Shit, would you look at Hopalong Cassidy?” Johnny said with an amused snort. “Appears our cowboy’s still got some giddyup, after all.”

Kyra stared at Dan Cody. She had to hand it to the bastard. While she and Johnny were talking, the wounded man had started crawling toward his raggedy-ass Jeep.

The cowboy didn’t have a whole lot
of give up
in him.

Kyra thought it over while the man bellied across the parking lot. No question about it—they’d have to locate an undisturbed place where Kyra could cast a spell of protection on the woman’s corpse. That meant they’d have to take the Injun bitch’s body with them, in order to prevent the Crow from resurrecting the dead woman.

Kyra smiled, realizing that a spell for two wasn’t any more difficult than a spell for one. The cowboy could come along for the ride, no problemo. The Merc’s trunk was big. Plenty of room for two in there.

Kind of a sweet little ending for these star-crossed lovers, actually. Kind of romantic, death and fate and heartaches of the eternal variety. Just like
Romeo and Juliet,
if Shakespeare could be believed. . . .

At that moment a sparkle of reflected moonlight caught Kyra’s eyes, and she noticed the wedding ring on the pavement at her feet.

She bent low, scooped it up, and showed it to Johnny.

“Our cowboy’s sure no big spender,” Johnny scoffed. “Hell, I’ve got tongue studs that cost more than that ring.”

Kyra nodded. The tiny diamonds embedded in the ring sure didn’t look like stars fallen from the night sky. But something told her that she should keep the wedding band, and she slipped it in the pocket of her leather coat.

“Well?” Johnny asked. “What’s the plan?”

Kyra pursed her black lips. “I see it this way—the girl’s dead, and we can’t have a wedding just for one, can we?”

Johnny grinned. “That just wouldn’t be Christian.”

“So I reckon we’d better do the Christian thing, then.”

“What’s that?”

“Bury them . . . together.”

Johnny Church raised the .357 and set his sights on the cowboy’s back.

“You wouldn’t shoot a cowboy in the back,” Kyra said. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, Johnny?”

“Forget all that code of the West bullshit, babe,” Johnny said. He cocked his pistol.

“Welcome to the new millennium, buckaroo.”

A second later a shot rang out, and the echo was lost in the wide silence of the desert.

Dan Cody never saw death coming.

It was better that way.

Better that he died while inching painfully toward life, even if he was crawling on his belly.

And there was the end to a dream, summed up just like that.

It might have ended this way, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.

It might have ended this way, except for one thing—a Crow that circled high in a midnight expanse pierced with gleaming stars. Not at all patient, that Crow, but silent ... its mournful caw
trapped in the hollow bones of its chest like the three words that had been locked in a dead cowboy’s head.

It was too late, now, for avian warnings from above. But like Dan Cody, and like Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin, the Crow didn’t have a whole lot of
give up
in him.

The bird circled lower as Kyra Damon went about her nasty business with the Mountain Clan Crow knife. Its dark eyes gleamed like tiny black diamonds as it saw all there was to see, and then some.

The Crow watched as the remorse-challenged killers piled the bodies of Dan Cody and Leticia Hardin into the trunk of the cherried- out ’49 Merc. It watched as the killers tossed a blood-soaked bouquet of roses on top of the corpses and laughed.

It watched as Johnny Church slammed the trunk and picked up the resin-encased scorpion that Leticia Hardin had thrown through the trading post window, and it watched as Church
thunked
that scorpion paperweight on top of the Merc’s dashboard like some obscene souvenir.

And it watched as demon taillights flared alive, and exhaust coughed up a phlegm of brimstone, and the death car roared away from the silent parking lot and into the desert night.

Not much was left behind to tell the tale.

Bloodstained cement, and broken glass, and broken dreams,

Sand scorpions.

They crawled over gravel and cracked asphalt, scurrying like a fistful of shadows.

The Crow swept down and trapped a shiny black arachnid in its talons. The scorpion squirmed and stung, but the Crow was impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Swiftly, efficiently, the Crow crunched through the tiny predator’s chitinous exoskeleton, sucking dark poison as if it were vintage bordeaux.

The poison tasted good.

It tasted like vengeance.