Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (15 page)

“You are even a better witch than I imagined,” Charlie said, letting his flat brown eyes roam lustily across the woman’s exquisite, black-and-brown-clad, well-armed figure.

“How’s that,
mi amigo
?” Ravenna asked as she stopped before him, smiling and showing all those perfect white teeth though his eyes were lingering on the black vest, which was all she wore beneath the duster and which revealed more of her full, enticing, olive-hued breasts than it hid. The top of each one was tattooed in black with a weirdly shaped symbol—a totem of some kind.

“I was just thinking of you before I saw…” Charlie glanced past her at the dragon, whose sides expanded and contracted slowly, heavily, as he breathed, his scales sparkling as the light dashed across them with each expansion and contraction. “Your crazy bird there…”

“Be careful, Senor Charlie,” Ravenna said, lifting her chin to smile up at him while waving a finger in good-natured admonishment. “Chico does not like to be called a bird.” She glanced over her shoulder at the dragon. “What the hell, Chico.
Va la causa un cierto apuro, huh!
”
Go wreak some havoc!

Eagerly, Chico flapped his great wings, rising up on his giant, birdlike legs, and heaved himself into the sky. The wind of his wings lifted dust and grit against which Charlie and Ravenna closed their eyes and held their hats down tight to their heads.

“What are dragons, anyway?” Charlie asked when the bird was winging off to the west and banking north, as if suddenly sensing prey in that direction.

“They are dragons, fool.” Ravenna rose up on the toes of her fancily stitched, red, black-topped boots to plant a kiss very lightly on his lips. “You were thinking of
me
,
Major Charlie
?” she said, running her fingers over the shoulder straps on his greatcoat, obviously surprised and flattered.

“Encountered a little problem we need to disc—”

He stopped when one of the men inside the cabin cursed loudly. Running footsteps sounded, emanating out the open door until the girl, looking frantic, a torn strap of her dress hanging down to reveal a wash-worn camisole behind which her right breast jiggled, dashed across the veranda and bolted past Charlie and Ravenna. As the girl headed for the barn, leaping the stage driver’s bloody carcass, One-Eye came running out of the station house, flanked by Lucky and Curly Joe, whose lower lip was bleeding.

“Bitch bit me!” he raged.

The three stopped when they saw Ravenna with Charlie. “What the hell is that?” said Curly, slowing as he came down the steps and pointing at the dragon now winging back over the stage station. The other two were casting incredulous looks between the dragon and the beautiful senorita in the black duster and revealing fawn vest from behind which her ample breasts swelled invitingly.

“My horse!” said Ravenna delightedly. “I’ve put him out to pasture for the time being.” Looking at Charlie, she said, canting her head toward the barn, “Who’s the whore? You haven’t been cheating on me, have you, Charlie?”

She nudged one of her round hips against Hondo’s crotch, stuck a finger through one of his gold earrings, and gave it a gentle, chiding tug. “I’ve been saving myself for you ever since Dodge City!”

Charlie tittered. “The hell you say!”

“Be careful or I’ll send you there,” she admonished with just enough of an edge to rock Charlie back on his heels. “You know I have the magic for it.”

Glancing again at the dragon just now fading from sight but obviously more compelled by the prospect of toiling between the station girl’s legs, Lucky bolted away from Charlie and Ravenna, heading for the barn.

“Hey, slow your horses!” shouted One-Eye, sprinting for the barn.

Curly Joe wiped blood off his lip and took off after the others. “I git her first, goddamnit! She drew my blood!”

Charlie watched the three, hearing their spurs chinging, shaking his head and chuckling.

“Were they so depraved in the Old Country?”

“Oh, I reckon.” Charlie looked at the witch and necromancer and gave her low-cut vest a commanding tug. “We best talk business,
chiquita
. We got problems. “

“Business?” Ravenna stuck her two index fingers behind the waistband of Hondo’s pants and returned the tug. “But I just got here, and I smell like Chico. I must have a bath.
Vamos!
” She grabbed his hand and jerked him along behind her as she mounted the veranda. “We’ll take one together, Charlie! It’ll be fun.
You’ll see!
”

She laughed and dashed into the cabin. Unable to resist such a delectable creature, and forgetting for the moment that she could send him to the devil’s own Hell in pieces, he ran in after her and closed and locked the door behind them.

One-Eye and the others could sleep in the barn.

Chapter 14
    

HATHAWAY

As the dragon careened toward him and Angel, Uriah Zane raised his Henry repeater to his shoulder, took hasty aim, and fired.

He didn’t wait to see if his paltry round had any effect on the beast, but swung around and followed Angel back into the crease between the rounded mounds of ancient lava. He’d only just pulled his left foot behind the cover, when a great rumbling and
whoosh
sounded and orange flames licked over the top of the dyke, curling down its sides to within a few feet of Zane and Angel.

The heat was like that of blacksmith’s fully stoked bellows, and it smelled like brimstone.

“Uriah!” Angel shouted, ducking into a two-foot-high notch cave at the very base of the dyke.

Zane threw his big body down and rolled into the notch
behind the redhead just as another stout, roiling lance of fire hammered into the ground behind him. He rolled away from the flames that curled a few inches into the gap. He half rolled on top of Angel, shielding her body with his own. There was a great rushing of wings, and as the smell of scorched earth permeated the cave, what sounded like the squeals of an enraged pig rattled Zane’s eardrums.

He gritted his teeth against it. Her face turned toward his, Angel did the same.

The squeals dwindled into the distance, as did the rushing of the wings.

“Christ!” Angel said.

“Not even close.”

Zane started to roll away from her. She grabbed his arm. “Wait. It might be circling.”

“I’ll see.”

Her face reddened in anger, making the hooked scar beneath her eye turn pale. “Give it another minute, goddamnit, Uriah! We know nothing about those…”

She let her voice trail off. Zane, ignoring her as he usually did, had rolled out of the notch cave and, on one knee, holding his Henry in his hands, surveyed the skies. All clear. The ground around him—the sand, gravel, sparse tufts of sage and Spanish bayonet—were black and smoking.

“It’s clear.”

Angel rolled out and climbed to her knees, looking around. Zane remained there, too, scowling up at the blue sky, wondering if he’d really seen what he thought he had.

He’d heard the legends, of course. What kid hadn’t? A few people claimed to have seen such winged dinosaurs, but none of
the stories had ever been corroborated. But then, when he’d been a kid growing up on his father’s plantation west of Charlotte, blood-swillers and shapeshifters had been legends, too. They’d been thought to exist only in Europe and isolated pockets here and there about the West, but few white men had yet seen them.

For him, tales of the shapeshifters from faraway lands had dissolved in a cold rush of bloody reality that night in the hollows of the hills near Gettysburg, when Grant and Buford had turned loose their recruited horde of werewolves.

Zane gave a shudder, remembering that awful night, seeing the man-beasts—wolves twice the normal size and with vaguely man-shaped heads but wolflike fangs and claws—running upright and storming into the Confederate bivouacs even as the pickets screamed and fired on them with their crude trapdoor Springfields, and soldiers poured out of their tents in terrified confusion, thinking it was the blue bellies attacking at night.

In just a few hours, every Confederate soldier save a lucky few, like Zane himself, wounded earlier that day by a Union minié ball to the neck, had been ripped to bleeding piles of viscera steaming in the full moon’s pearl light. Zane’s own brother, Zachary, had been one of those piles….

“Where are the horses?” Angel said after a time, breaking the pregnant, eerie silence.

Zane heard her as though she were a half mile away. He was still staring at the sky, hearing the howls, snarls, and squeals of his doomed Southern brethren.

Angel placed her hand on his forearm. “Uriah.”

He turned to her sharply, startled. “What?”

“Did you see the horses?”

Zane looked around. He’d forgotten about them. He didn’t
think they’d been in the crease between the dykes before he and Angel had fled from the fire-breathing demon. “Must have run off. Good thing.” He ran a big hand down his bearded face, pressing away the horrible memories aroused by the beast who’d nearly burned him and Angel to cinders. “I’d hate to be stranded out here afoot with that winged devil flying around.”

She closed her fingers a little tighter about his arm. “You okay?”

The question annoyed him. In his line of work, a man didn’t have time for the distractions of memory. Furling his brows angrily, he pulled his arm away and said, “Yeah.”

He heaved himself to his feet, walked out the opposite end of the notch, and looked around. General Lee and Angel’s paint, Cisco, stood a good half mile off, reins dangling as they nervously looked around, twitching their tails, as terrorized by the winged beast as Zane and Angel were. The wheeled casket was still in the palo’s tow, looking none the worse for wear.

“What’s going on, Uriah?” Angel came up to stand beside him. “You’ve been hunting spooks longer than I have. You ever see anything like that before?”

“Not since yesterday. Caught a brief glimpse of one, maybe the same one, on the way into Gunnison.”

Zane was still squinting up at the sky. A winged giant that spat fire would be one hell of a formidable foe. He doubted even the Gatling gun would be of use against it, unless he could get it in close. But then you had the fire to worry about.

“Till then, I never seen one. Heard somethin’, though….”

He tried to remember the story he’d heard a couple of years ago in Mexico.

“Somethin’ about a young girl from a wealthy hacienda down
Sonora way…” Again, he let his voice trail off and jerked his head to the north, in the direction he and Angel had been traveling. Beyond a low jog of brown hills sounded the muffled snaps of gunfire. In the sky careened a winged figure, a column of orange light angling groundward.

Angel said tonelessly, “It’s after somebody else.”

Distant screams sounded amid the shrill whinnies of terrified horses.

“Let’s go,” Zane said, jogging in the direction of his and Angel’s horses, resting his rifle on his right shoulder.

He moved fleetly for a big man, and it was all Angel could do to match his long strides. When they gained the horses, they quickly went over the tack, tightening latigo cinches and pack straps that might have come loose when the mounts had fled the dragon. When he was sure that the wheeled coffin was still harnessed properly to General Lee, Zane swung up into his saddle and slid his Henry repeater into its sheath, which was angling forward across his right stirrup, and touched spurs to the palo’s flanks.

General Lee had great power in his legs. The stallion bounded off its rear hooves with a shrill whinny, it and the trailing coffin angling northward. Zane stayed wide of the burned Indians and their dead horses, knowing his own horse would be repelled by the stench.

He glanced over his shoulder to see Angel galloping about twenty yards behind him. The woman was a wonder to him. She could be as much female in bed as a man could ever need or want, yet she had the sand of a seasoned frontiersman to boot. He knew she was afraid, because she wasn’t crazy—hell, his own guts were pulled in a hard knot—but as she crouched over her paint’s neck,
her hat brim pulled low against her jade eyes, red hair flying out behind her, she looked more determined than anything else.

But what did Zane expect from the daughter of the famed lawman? She wore his boots well. At least, the boots he’d once worn.

Ahead, as Zane and Angel headed for a notch in the brown, boulder-strewn hills, the shots grew louder but then dwindled as Zane saw the dragon pull off to the northeast. The flapping wings and body merged into a single dot, and then the dot was swallowed up by the sky, leaving Zane to clench his belly tight as he wondered what devastation it had left in its wake.

Rising smoke told him where to head, and, following a crease between the rocky hills, he came to a broad bowl cut into the side of a high bluff. Here, horses and men lay scorched and sizzling, strewn about the rocks and brush of the bowl as though, like the Indians, they’d been dropped from the sky. Zane rode ahead, and Angel followed suit, widening the gap between them as they both surveyed the carnage.

Most of the horses and bodies were charred beyond recognition, but Zane saw a sleeve on one of the cadavers that was burned down to the charred bone, smoke slithering out its eye sockets. The sleeve was blue wool and had a cavalry sergeant’s three bars worn point down on it. Elsewhere, Zane saw a blue cavalry kepi and a mule-eared, low-heeled, stovepipe cavalry boot with a smoking black leg bone sticking up out of it. On a horse’s wither he saw the customary U.S. brand.