The Gunslinger's Man (11 page)

His campfire should have been the heart of town. Halloran should have had his back to Ambrose’s ugly mansion.

“It ain’t real,” Asher breathed. His heart skipped a beat. “None of this is real. You ain’t—”

“Oh, I’m here.”

“In my head?”

“In your blood.” Halloran rolled his eyes. “Or the other way around.”

The pinch of nerves in Asher’s chest threatened to suffocate him. “I don’t—I don’t understand.”

“As long as I’ve got your blood in my veins, I can see into your head.”

“Even when I’m awake?”

“No.”

“Oh.”
Thank God.
All the vicious, mortifying thoughts that routinely flitted through Asher’s mind were not meant for public consumption—let alone that of a vampire. Another puzzle piece slid into place. “You’ve been in my head every night for
weeks
?”

“Never needed to.”

“But you
could
.” The last time Asher had been so horrified he’d been made immobile and dumb at Ambrose’s get-together. How could he have spent his life among vampires and still know so little of their abilities?

“Focus,” Halloran grunted. “You can turn hysterical all you like once you wake up. Right now, you need to tell me where you are.”

Asher looked up, perplexed. “Why would I want to do that?”

Halloran’s aggravation made itself known with a growl. “We have small window to claim you were taken against your will, but it’s closing fast. Once it does, I won’t be able to help you.”

“I wasn’t.”

Firelight reflected in Halloran’s eyes, twin flames burnishing in the depths of his inky pupils. “You don’t say.”

“You can’t ask me to turn my friends in just so you’ll preserve your precious spot in Ambrose’s good graces.”

“Ah, that’s your source of confusion. You thought I was
asking
.”

Perhaps it was the cold sweeping over Asher so fiercely it allowed no other sensation to take seed. Perhaps it was that his dormant courage had chosen this moment to awaken. Whatever the reason, Asher didn’t look away beneath the weight of Halloran’s glower. Nor did he rise to the bait.

“Don’t be a fool. Wherever you are right now, it ain’t gonna be for long. Ambrose
will
send someone to bring you back.”

“And if he doesn’t,” Asher surmised, “you will?”

“You’re leaving me no choice.”

“Seems to me you’re the one holding all the cards. Ain’t no one forcing you to do anything you don’t wanna do… Only I can think of you’re doin’ Ambrose’s dirty work for him is ’cause you’re really hurtin’ for money.” Either that or Halloran was every bit as rotten as the rest of his kind.

His expression frozen in a sort of half scowl, as though astonishment had paralyzed his muscles, Halloran clucked his tongue. “You truly believe that.”

“I do,” said Asher, willing his voice not to waver. “And I’ll take my chances out here.”

“Then why aren’t you waking up?”

“What?”

“
Asher,
wake up!
”

Halloran’s snarl slammed into Asher like a stick of dynamite, flattening him to the ground. But when his vision cleared, it wasn’t Halloran looming above him and it wasn’t the crow-pocked sky.

“You all right?” Connie asked. “You were talking in your sleep…”

Wooden walls and wooden roof resolved around Asher in swift order. The bedding under his hands was a far cry from the coarse wool blanket he’d clutched to his shoulders mere seconds before. His heart throbbed against his ribs.

It was just a dream. Nothing more. A dream of Halloran, sure, but harmless in every other way.

“Didn’t say anything good, did I?” Asher asked, mostly joking.

“Mostly mumbled some shit,” Wesley answered from across the room. He had found a perch in the window and when he wasn’t glaring at Asher, he was snatching glances through the lacy curtain into the street outside.

The hotel they’d been brought to was nicer than anything Sargasso had to offer. Brass-trimmed furnishings inspired a sense of wealth in the suite and the bed’s thick mattress had been effective in lulling Asher to sleep. Uncle Howard, presently dozing, seemed to have found the recliner by the window equally comfortable.

Asher righted himself as Connie backed off to give him room.

“How long was I out?”

“An hour or so.” Connie dropped gingerly to the edge of the bed. “No one came, though I heard footsteps on the landing.”

“You imagined ’em,” Wesley muttered.

Connie sighed. “He’s got his back up ’cause you were right.”

This was news to Asher. “How do you mean?” he asked, tugging a hand over his face to banish the last tendrils of sleep.

Halloran’s warm, gravelly voice would take longer to excise from memory.

“We shouldn’t have come here. Moreau’s just like the others.”

“We don’t know that,” Asher said. In an attempt to soothe, he reached for one of Connie’s hands and clasped it tightly in his. “Could be mayor’s just a bit put off to hear where we came from.”

“You don’t buy that.”

“’Course he doesn’t,” Wesley snapped. “We’ve been locked up for hours while some bloodsucker figures out what to do with us. Other than it being just another Tuesday for our Asher here, it ain’t exactly the safe haven we was hopin’ for, is it?”

“It’s not his fault—”

“Aw, shit,” Wesley groaned, steamrolling Connie’s attempt to speak up. “Here he comes.”

Asher and Connie hurried to join him in the window, but they could barely catch a glimpse of Redemption’s mayor before he disappeared under the porch roof. Moreau wasn’t alone, Asher noted, a beat before a curiously demure knock rang through the suite door.

Uncle Howard jolted awake at the sound, his glasses threatening to slip off his nose. “What—what’s happening?”

“Visitors,” Asher murmured under his breath. Then, a little louder, “Come in.”

The door swung open to reveal Moreau in the same brown shirt and pants he’d worn behind the saloon bar. With his wide, beaming grin, he looked no older than eighteen. No more menacing, either.

Vampires could be deceptive that way.

“So sorry for the suspense, ladies and gentlemen. Trust you find our hospitality acceptable so far?” he asked, tucking his thumbs into his suspenders.

“You’re very kind,” Asher managed tepidly.

“Mm… Of course, where you’re from, I suppose you’d have been locked in with the cattle.” Moreau sauntered deeper into the room, his coterie fanning out behind him.

Asher counted two familiar faces among the three Moreau had brought with him. He had seen the women at Ambrose’s, both decked out in taffeta and lace, their hair pinned with gleaming combs that caught the gaslight. Here they wore nondescript, rough-spun frocks with demure collars, hair bound into unassuming plaits which hung over their bony shoulders.

“Ah, yes. You must be wondering why my friends are here.” Moreau smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “While I’m tempted to keep you here and find out all I can about Sargasso’s defenses, I can’t deny my Christian duty. Y’all deserve a good night’s rest. And some food, by the looks of you. Victoria and Lucretia will take good care of you gentlemen. As for you, Miss…?”

“Pinkham,” Connie put in, voice a tad shaky.

“Miss Pinkham,” Moreau repeated, drawing out the second syllable. I’ve got every confidence you’ll find Ivan more than adequate company—”

“She ain’t going nowhere without one of us,” Wesley barked, caution thrown firmly to the wind.

Ivan arched his eyebrows, though his features remained otherwise perfectly immobile. He was a beanpole of a man with inky black hair shot with white, and a hook nose. He reminded Asher of no one so much as Malachi, provided Ambrose had waited another fifteen years to give him the bite and imparted a few punches beforehand.

“Ms. Pinkham will be perfectly safe with Ivan,” said Moreau, the smile gone from his plush lips.

Asher heard the warning in his voice. “We have your word?” He shushed Wesley’s noise of protest.

“Of course.” Moreau put out a hand. “If it makes you feel any better,
you
can spend the night in my lodgings. I live just across down the lane from Ivan’s.”

It had the allure of an offer, but Asher had spent enough time around vampires to know there was no such thing. Not for humans, anyway.

He nodded.

“Ms. Pinkham.” Ivan held out a skeletal hand.

Connie sucked in a breath and placed her palm in his. The last glimpse Asher had of her was just before she disappeared down the stairs, her features tense with apprehension. She would be careful. She’d survived puberty in Sargasso with her honor intact. If Asher had cause to worry for anyone, it was Wesley, who departed the suite with a mutinous scowl and an outright refusal to take Victoria’s arm.

Uncle Howard stole one final glance at Asher and tried to smile before Lucretia led him gently out the door. His lips couldn’t quite muster the effort.

“Don’t fret,” Moreau cooed. “You’ll see them in the morning.”

“Why couldn’t we stay together? We’d have made do with one bed—”

Moreau scoffed. “I’ve never heard anything more improper. No, no. In Redemption, we believe in doing things by the book. The sooner your friends find themselves a spouse, the better.”

His honeyed lilt was so palliative on Asher’s ears that he almost missed that final disclosure. “What?” He made to break off Moreau’s grip, but the vampire was faster and stronger.

“Oh, we’ll find you a girl too”—Moreau chuckled, his hand tight around Asher’s elbow—“in due course. But first I want to know everything there is about the Red Horn Riders.”

Chapter Thirteen

“A vampire has to eat, my boy,” Uncle Howard had once told Asher. “You can hardly begrudge them their hunger when you wake up ready to chew the legs off the kitchen table, can you?”

At the time, Asher had believed it. Then his sixteenth birthday came around and no sooner had he finished celebrating that one of Ambrose’s acolytes helped himself to a taste right in the street, in full view of anyone who cared to look.

No one did.

The same neighbors who’d watched him grow from a boy into a man, who’d congratulated him just hours before, now averted their eyes and went about their business as though they couldn’t hear his screams. It had felt as if his throat were being ripped open, but pain hadn’t been the only reason his knees had melted under him. The shock of what was happening and his reaction to the ordeal had shaken Asher worse than any beating.

He remembered how his hands had quaked as he’d washed the blood off his shirt that night. He also remembered the guilty stirring in the pit of his stomach when he’d thought of the vampire’s fangs in his throat, of the sickening, seductive stroke of his tongue over the wound.

Ambrose’s law had kept Asher from discovering his weakness for a bloodsucker’s bite for sixteen years. In the ten that had followed since, Asher had tried everything to cure himself of the affliction.

He blamed his recent stint as Halloran’s prisoner for undoing all that hard work.

He blamed Halloran altogether for the desperate arch of his body into Moreau’s hands, his cock a hard, unwelcome weight straining in the confines of his trousers.

“You
are
sweet, aren’t you?” Moreau hummed, curled around Asher in bed. “You’ll make your lady very happy.”

That he liked to talk while he fed Asher had already made his peace with. That what he insisted on talking about happened to trigger salvos of panic in the pit of Asher’s stomach was another matter entirely.

“What if—what if I don’t
want
a lady?” Asher panted, coherent thought rendered somewhat challenging by the throbbing between his legs.

Moreau picked his blond head up, mouth red. When he spoke, it was around his gleaming fangs. “What a queer notion. Sweet as you are, ain’t no vampire master in this town gonna put you in his henhouse.”

I’m not interested,
Asher wanted to grit out,
in hens
. He’d never put his preference into words before and it wasn’t Moreau who would get him to break that vow of silence.

Still, as Moreau went back to feeding and Asher slipped further and further from consciousness, he couldn’t help think he would have liked to at least be given a choice. But that was his lot as bloodsucker bait, wasn’t it? No choice. No say in what happened to him.

He could leave Sargasso but the old rules followed him like a chronic disease.

“You’re still alive. You should count yourself lucky.”

The voice did not belong to Moreau, but it wasn’t until Asher opened his eyes that he saw Halloran in the chair by the window, moonlight gleaming on the satin shoulders of his waistcoat.

Asher blinked in the rest of their surroundings. He recognized the heavy velvet drapes and frayed rug. He’d paced it often enough. The mirror across the bed revealed him to be wearing the clothes he’d been thrust into for Ambrose’s soiree.

“We’re back at Willowbranch.”

“
I
am,” Halloran corrected. “Wherever you are, you’re sleeping.”

This again.
Asher pushed himself up against the headboard, which creaked just as loudly as he remembered. He tried not to dwell on Halloran shoving him up against it and coming as close to ravaging him as any other time before or since.

It wasn’t worth thinking about.

“Are you…well?” Halloran asked at length, scowling as though the question itself offended him.

Or perhaps not the question. Perhaps it was the burden of having to fill the silence with speech that bothered him.

“I’ve been better,” Asher confessed and swept his glance over the boudoir. “But then I’ve also been worse. Chained to a bed in the nude comes to mind…”

Halloran’s scowl didn’t ease at the jape. If anything, it deepened. A curious thing. Asher would have expected him to reflect on that portion of their acquaintance with some satisfaction.

“And you?” he heard himself ask. “Is Ambrose giving you hell?”

“He ain’t best pleased with me at the moment… But no. He needs me.”

“Why?” Asher wouldn’t have dared voice the query while awake and in the same room as Halloran. He reasoned that if Halloran was just a figment of his imagination now, it couldn’t do any harm.