Night of the Wolves (5 page)

Behind her, Cody Fox cleared his throat. “I’m a medical doctor with a Harvard degree. If he needs help, I’ll be there to do what I can.”

Alex wasn’t about to be stopped. “I’m going with you,” she said stubbornly.

She saw Brendan look at Cody, waiting for his approval before moving. She wondered what was so powerful about the younger man that Brendan deferred so readily to his authority.

“Whatever you wish,” Cody said impatiently. “The situation is undoubtedly dire, so we need to hurry.”

With Brendan in the lead, they headed along the wood-plank sidewalk that had been built beside the main street to let people avoid the mud and muck of the broad dirt road. When they reached the end of the walk, they headed out into the street and across to the building that housed the combination dentist and barber shop.

A crowd had gathered there, but no one had approached the man lying facedown on the ground.

“Coming through,” Brendan announced.

The crowd backed away, white-faced and tight-lipped.

“Why isn’t someone helping him?” Alex asked, looking around the crowd. She saw people she recognized, who quickly lowered their eyes.

Cody hunkered down by the man, turning him over. Alex felt a quickening in her heart, followed by relief when she realized she didn’t know the man. He was about forty, and he wasn’t going to need a doctor. He had a huge bloodstain on his shirt, and his eyes were open and unseeing.

“Is he from around here?” Cody asked, looking around.

“I don’t know him,” Alex said.

A man stepped forward. One she did know. Jim Green, the local mortician and photographer.

“He’s not one of ours,” Jim said. He was a kindly old fellow with silvery hair and matching old-fashioned muttonchops. “He must have come in with the outlaws.”

“Who shot him?” Cody asked.

Another man cleared his throat. Ace Henley, who ran the livery. “I was up in my loft, and I got in a few shots when they were whooping and hollering and blowing holes in the sky.”

Cody studied him and nodded. “That’s good. That’s what we’re going to need—a plan to get everyone into a position from which to fight, for next time they come in like they did.”

“What’ll we do with him?” Brendan asked, nodding toward the corpse.

Strange question, Alex thought. He was a dead man. Bury him. Even an outlaw had to be buried. What the hell else were they going to do with him?

“The usual,” Cody said, rising, dusting his hands on his jeans.

“It’s getting dark,” Brendan commented.

“So it is. I’ll get him over to the mortuary. Fellows, you got a place we can bury him?” Cody asked, looking from person to person in the crowd. “Might as well get him in the ground tonight.”

“There’s no preacher tonight,” Jim said. “Though I don’t rightly know if a preacher would say the words over…such a…one.”

The two men exchanged a meaningful look, as if acknowledging a shared but unspoken truth. Alex wondered uneasily what was going on and whether it had anything
to do with the strange state of affairs she’d found at the boardinghouse when she arrived that afternoon. Garlands of garlic decorating the windows and wardrobes, and an abundance of crosses hung in every room. Just what was going on here?

“He was a man, a man who had a soul at some time,” Cody said. “We can say some words, and when a preacher comes, he can say those words all over again. Now, let’s get him out of the street before night comes on.”

“Right,” Jim said, and cleared his throat. “It’s all over town how you two saved the place, mister. We’re right grateful.” He doffed his broad-brimmed hat in Cody’s direction and nodded to Brendan. “I’m Jim Green, mortician and photographer, at your service. We’re mighty glad to have you.”

“Thank you,” Cody told him. “Anyone seen the sheriff yet?”

“Him and the deputy went off just about an hour or so ago—there was talk of some cattle rustling out at Calico Jack’s. That would be John Snow’s trading post,” Ace clarified.

John Snow-on-Leaf, now known simply as John Snow, was part white, part Mexican, part Apache and all entrepreneur, Alex thought. He and his current wife and twenty of his children—a brood whose color went from sable to snow—managed the trading post where the tribes and white folk alike came and went.

Cody nodded, glancing at Brendan Vincent. “All right, anybody sees the sheriff, tell him I’d like to meet him come the morning. Now, let’s deal with the dead.”

He reached down and grabbed the dead man under his armpits as Brendan went for the man’s ankles.

“Lead on, Mr. Green,” Brendan said.

“Right this way,” Jim said.

The crowd broke apart and began to disperse, everyone looking uneasily at the sky, as if they were desperate to be off the streets before dark.

Alex stood there, watching the townspeople and frowning.

Strange—no, bizarre—the way people were behaving.

As if he sensed she was still standing there, Cody paused and turned back. “Go home, Miss Gordon. Please.”

Then he started walking away again, the weight of the dead man suspended between him and Brendan Vincent. Either one of them might have thrown the body over a shoulder and carried it easily.

They didn’t seem to want to touch the blood.

Spooked by the intensity of his insistence that she go home, but too stubborn to just run away without knowing what was going on, she decided to pretend to obey his directive. She walked away and stepped up on the sidewalk, then paused and looked around.

No one was left on the street. It was as if the town were deserted. When she saw Fox and Vincent follow Green into his place of business, she stepped back off the sidewalk and walked swiftly and as silently as she could in their wake.

The door to Jim Green’s photography studio and mortuary was closed by the time she got there, but the curtains were still open at the windows, and kerosene lamps were lit within.

The front room held the photography studio; the mortuary was in the rear. Someone had neglected to shut the door between the two, so she stood to one side of the big front window and peered in.

The men had carried the body through to the back and placed it on a long oak slab—a rudimentary embalming table. Green’s instruments were laid out on a small cart nearby. Since the war, she knew, the art of embalming was in demand.

There were a lot of dead boys making the long journey home.

She continued to stare through the window, carefully trying to shield herself from the men within.

They were examining the body and talking, but she could only catch snatches of the conversation.

“I don’t think so. I really don’t think so,” she heard Cody say.

“We have to think about safety,” Jim said.

“He’s right, Cody—better safe than sorry,” Vincent added.

Cody studied the corpse, turning it, touching the throat and studying it, as if he might find a pulse.

Doctor? Educated at Harvard? A farm boy could see there was a massive shotgun hole in the man’s chest.

“Better safe than sorry,” Cody agreed.

Jim Green handed him a long knife with an edge so sharp it glittered like diamonds in the lamplight.

Cody took the knife.

She nearly gasped aloud as she saw him position himself—then sever the corpse’s jugular.

She clamped a hand over her mouth and leaned against the wall, stunned. Then she turned back to the window again, thinking that her eyes must have deceived her.

Now only Jim Green was standing over the corpse. Or rather, the pieces of the corpse.

There wasn’t all that much blood, but then, the man had
already bled out all over the street; a shotgun blast could do that to a fellow.

But now…Now the dead man’s head had been severed cleanly from his body. The face was turned toward her, the eyes staring out at her.

Caught in the glow of the lamplight, they seemed to be alive.

They seemed to be staring straight into her soul.

A
LEX HURRIED BACK
to the boardinghouse, deep in thought, the image of the dead man’s eyes burned into her brain. She opened the front door and stepped inside, thinking that the world had gone mad.

Of course, in a way the world had gone mad the day the first shot of the war had been fired. But this was something worse. Worse? What could be worse than a war that was exterminating half the young men of a divided country?

Losing all sanity and all souls.

The thought came to her unbidden, and she shook it off. But what was happening here
was
strange. People were behaving
differently
.

Cody and Jim had literally severed the dead man’s head.

“There you are, Alex!” Beulah chastised her as she came through from the kitchen, clasping a hand to her heart. “Don’t you go round worrying me so now, young lady, do you hear?”

Alex stared at her. “Beulah, I was right down the street.”

“Maybe so, but you need to be inside now. It’s dark, and the moon…well, the moon is out.”

Alex smiled, giving her a hug and wondering what the moon had to do with anything. “I’m fine. The bad guys
got sent away with their tails between their legs. Tonight we’re all safe.”

Beulah drew back, shaking her head sadly. “Honey child, no time is safe anymore. But darkness? It’s not safe at all.”

Alex stared at the older woman.

“Beulah, what’s going on here?” she asked.

“Evil,” Beulah said sagely.

“Evil?”

“Bad things, very bad things. It’s like the devil himself is trying to take hold here. Oh, honey, I don’t know everything. But it’s like an evil disease. So we just stay inside. Oh, Lordy! Brigsby gone. And Hollow Tree, too, I hear tell…and now Victory. Maybe we thought we’d be spared. Maybe we felt we couldn’t do a thing about it ’cept run, and for too many folks, this is all we have and there ain’t nowhere to run
to
.”

“Beulah, I don’t understand you,” Alex said impatiently.

“I don’t rightly understand it myself,” Beulah said, then smiled suddenly, her eyes lighting up. “But tonight…well, that was a miracle, it was, those two fellows turning up when they did. And now they’ll be staying here. What a fine thing that is.”

Beulah made the sign of the cross over her ample chest as she spoke.

Alex nodded. That much was true. She would definitely feel safer with the men who had successfully defied the outlaws staying in her boardinghouse.

Suddenly her smile of agreement froze on her face.

She had just watched Cody Fox decapitate a dead man.

With the blessing—no, at the insistence of—of Jim Green.

She realized she was exhausted. No doubt the world would look normal again after a good night’s rest.

“I think I have to go to sleep,” she told Beulah.

“You need to have something to eat, child,” Beulah said.

Alex laughed. “Beulah, you’re a sweetheart, but I’m too tired to eat. I’m going to go up to bed now, and I’ll worry about what’s going on in the morning.”

“It’s the devil,” Beulah said, nodding sagely.

Alex took Beulah’s hands. “I saw the devil’s work when anger and hostility entered the hearts of men and sent them to war.” Her eyes grew sad. “I guarantee you, God has no part in the carnage of war. Whatever this is, we can fight it, and we will.”

“Maybe. Now that they’ve come,” Beulah agreed, then added, “But maybe not. This evening they came in a roar of gunfire. But sometimes they come in stealth and quiet, slipping into our lives and our souls—like the devil. Please, Alex, you heard what Cody Fox said to them fancy girls. It’s time to be smart and careful.”

Alex gave Beulah a hug. “I’ll be careful, I swear,” she promised, and headed for the stairs. Just dragging herself up the steps suddenly seemed like a tremendous effort.

She made it to her room. Her father’s room. No, her room now, as he would have wanted it to be.

One of the girls had laid out her nightdress, and left her a basin of water on the washstand. By rote, she carefully removed and hung her clothing, washed up and slipped on the nightgown. She dipped her hands into the water again to refresh her face, and caught her reflection in the mirror. In the white gown and the lamplight, she appeared gaunt and pale. As if she were some kind of wraith. Despite
herself, she found herself thinking of the women in the saloon. Dolly, who was so…assured. That new girl, oddly pretty and fresh. She paled in comparison. She winced. How odd! She wasn’t accustomed to feeling insecure.

She turned again to her reflection and realized she was comparing herself to others because…

Because of Cody Fox.

A flood of red heightened her cheeks as she continued staring into the mirror.

She took her towel and patted her face dry, and turned quickly away from the mirror, feeling ridiculous. The world had gone crazy—and she was worried about being noticed by a man. She definitely needed sleep. Ever since Grant’s death, she hadn’t even thought about men except when she’d volunteered at the hospital, where they’d simply been sad and scared human beings longing to die with the warmth and comfort of a woman’s hand clutching their own.

Maybe that was it. It had simply been so long since she had buried her fiancé, so long since she had even thought about appearances, attraction…and then a man like Cody Fox came along and suddenly she was seeing herself as a woman again.

Alex let out a sigh of irritation, blew out the lamp and crawled into bed.

Darkness, exhaustion. They would surely allow her to rest.

But she found that her eyes were drawn to the double French doors that led from the master suite to the balcony. The moon wasn’t full, but still there was a flood of light falling to earth from the heavens, a yellow glow permeating the world beyond her windows, making its way through the drapes.

Bathed in that glow, shadows moved. They looked like the wings of birds, giant birds dancing in the air beyond the window. She almost thought she could hear the rush of wings, but she knew it was only the sound of the wind as it rushed over the plain.

She forced herself to close her eyes, and at last she slept.

T
HEY WERE IN THE ACT
of burying the decapitated man when the sheriff and his deputy made it back into town at last.

The sheriff, Cole Granger, was a tall, hard-muscled man with sharp blue eyes and hair so dark it had a blue sheen in the moonlight. His deputy, Dave Hinton, was smaller, but he had a solid handshake and steady eyes.

Jim Green explained what had happened when Milo and his band of outlaws had come to town.

“These fellows saved us, and that’s a fact,” he said, then cleared his throat, kicking at the freshly dug mound of earth below his feet. “Honest, Cole, we weren’t being cowards—we just didn’t know what to do, you know? Ace Henley got this fellow, though. We don’t have a name for him, don’t know nothing about him. But we’ve taken care of him—and we’ve buried him deep.”

“Damn it, damn it all straight to hell!” Granger said, sounding disgusted with himself. “I shouldn’t have ridden out, and I sure as hell shouldn’t have taken Dave with me.” He looked Cody and Brendan in the eyes. “Thank you. I don’t know how the hell you did it, but thank you. There’d been trouble out at John Snow’s trading post—and I had to get out there, see what was going on. But I didn’t count on getting back so late.”

“We hit some trouble on the return,” Dave said.

“Trouble? What happened?” Cody asked.

“Darnedest thing,” Cole said, shaking his head. “We were coming through a patch of brush and trees about five miles from here when the horses just went crazy. Go figure. We’ve both been riding since before we could walk, and first we lose Dave’s horse, and he’s running around like a headless chicken till I can catch him and start to get him settled. Next thing you know, my Titan is rearing and snorting, and starting Dave’s horse going again. There was something out there, but damned if I know what. Wolves, coyotes, something. All I know is, I’ve never seen horses acting up so badly.” Cole stopped speaking and looked Cody in the eye again. “Everyone is saying the devil is loose in these parts. I don’t know what the devil is, but there’s sure as hell something going on. Something that lets Milo and his crew annihilate whole towns. I figured they’d be coming for us sooner or later. It’s just sooner than I expected.” He looked from Cody to Brendan, and back to Cody. “How the hell did you stop him?”

“I know Milo’s type,” Cody said. “I know how to make him believe that he’ll lose his own life if he doesn’t listen to me. I know this kind of enemy.”

“We finished decapitating the dead man,” Jim Green put in nervously.

Cole set a hand on Jim Green’s shoulder. “If you feel it was necessary, Jim, then that’s fine.”

“Absolutely right,” Dave agreed, shaking his head strenuously. Cody and Brendan exchanged a look. It was obvious that Dave thought the very devil was walking the streets.

Cole Granger was a harder man altogether, and his attitude
said he’d seen his share of vicious men. He clearly still believed that he was dealing with something real and tangible.

“With everything going on out here,” Cody said, “haven’t you gotten any help from the army or the U.S. Marshals?”

Cole Granger shook his head. “If we’d ever suspected we could all be wiped out this way, we might have gotten together and mustered up a militia. As to government help…Texas is part of the Confederacy, and the Confederacy has lost too many men to have any left to send out here. Our only help might come from Chief Tall Feather and the Apaches, and maybe some of his Comanche friends. At least we don’t have problems with the Indians out here. They live their lives, we live ours, and we trade. They say an evil spirit has come to earth and possessed the souls of men. I don’t know what it is, only that I’m not running and I
will
see these killers stopped.”

“How’d you know about the trouble out here?” Dave asked suddenly.

“I have family out here—or I did,” Brendan said, correcting himself. “And Cody’s folks lived in these parts. His father died out here.”

Cody shrugged.

“My mother went home—back to New Orleans—before I was born. But the important thing is that we’re here to help you fight. Tomorrow, as a matter of fact, if it sits well with you, Sheriff, I’m going to go out and meet that Indian chief. You say his name is Tall Feather?”

“That’s right. He’s a good man, even though the Apache are a warrior clan. Tall Feather sees the way the world is going. He says the Spirit Fathers have told him that the
white man will not go away, that he will come in greater numbers. If you can’t fight them, in his opinion, you should study them and figure out how to use them. Go ahead and talk to him—he’ll tell you what’s been going on.”

“What did you find out at the trading post?” Cody asked Cole, changing the subject.

Cole shook his head. “Two of John Snow’s children have gone missing, both of them beautiful young girls. But I couldn’t find a trail, not a drop of blood, not a broken branch. It’s as if the girls wandered into another dimension.”

“I’ll try to get out that way, too,” Cody said. “So where do Milo and his band hole up during the daylight hours?”

“No one knows,” Dave said.

“Brigsby, I’m thinking,” Cole said. “But I haven’t had a chance to get back out there to check. We had a gunslinger go through here a few weeks back, and he thought he was tougher than solid stone. He went out to Brigsby. We found what was left of his body on the ground out by where the horses went crazy on Dave and me.”

“We need to get out there as soon as we can manage it,” Cody said. “I’d like to be sure what we’re up against. Men like Milo…they can deceive, build traps. We need to find out everything we can if we’re going to fight them. Anyway, Sheriff, what you and your deputy here need to be doing is warning your townsfolk not to open their doors to strangers—and especially not even to be on the streets at night. I tried to tell the girls at the saloon that it was important to be…cautious, but that may have been a lost cause. Thing is—” Cody broke off, hesitating. The thing was, Cole Granger was going to have to accept some of
the truth of the matter—or else the sheriff would be running him out of town before he could count to three.

“Inviting folks in just leads to danger,” Cody finished lamely. “This place needs to be locked up tight at night. We’ll talk more in the morning, if that’s all right with you, Sheriff. I think we’re all worn to the bone right now.”

“Good night, then,” Cole said, and Cody and Brendan started out of the graveyard. “Hey,” Cole said, calling them back. “Where are you staying?”

“Miss Alex is back in town. They’re over at the boardinghouse,” Dave said.

“Right. Alex is home,” Cole said thoughtfully. “Good night, then. And thank you for your help this evening. I offer you a true welcome to Victory.”

Cody waved a hand in acknowledgment, wondering at the sheriff’s tone when he’d mentioned Alex’s name. Was something going on there? Long-ago lovers? She had gone back East to marry, so the story went. But now that she was back in town, maybe things would be rekindled out here. Why not? The sheriff seemed like a good man, young, good-looking. And Alexandra Gordon was…beautiful. More than that. She was a fighter. There was a life inside her that was like a shimmering flame, beckoning everyone to her.