Walking Wolf (19 page)

Tears of rage burned the back of my throat. I had to turn away to keep from losing control of myself. It would have been so easy—and so sweet—to simply cast aside my human skin and fall upon the killers of my kinsman. But I knew there was nothing to be gained from such an action—unless it was my death. I had yet to die from a gunshot wound, but I wasn't sure if having an entire garrison shooting into my hide might not prove fatal.

One of the armed guards standing watch over Sitting Bull's pitiful remains was a member of the Indian Police—those who Strikes-the-Kettle had called “Metal Breasts.” To my surprise, I recognized him as High Eagle, a Sioux warrior who had once followed Sitting Bull in the days before the surrender. The older Indian recognized me as well and shifted about uneasily, trying not to meet my eyes. I would not let him get away so easily.

“So, High Eagle,” I said in the tongue of the Lakota. “Are you proud of the thing you have done today?”

High Eagle stiffened at my words and met my gaze. What I saw in his eyes as he spoke was both sad and horribly aware. “We have killed our chief. What is there to be proud of?”

Having seen Sitting Bull's body, I got on my horse and rode back out of the agency. What else was there for me to do but go home? I had no way of knowing that once word of Sitting Bull's assassination reached the Ghost Dancers, Kicking Bear would saddle up for war. Nor could I have known that Big Foot's band of starving, pneumonia-ridden pilgrims would soon meet their final, futile end on the banks of the Wounded Knee. In any case, it would not have changed what I found when I returned to my own camp, days later.

At least, I like to tell myself that.

Chapter Eleven

As I rode across the Wyoming grasslands, where the buffalo had once roamed as thick as fleas on a hound's ear, an ice storm came whipping down out of the mountains. The sleet froze to me almost immediately, and I was forced to shift into my true skin to keep from freezing to my saddle. As it was, my pony wasn't faring that well. It wasn't long before I was forced to find shelter and wait out the storm, huddled against my mount for warmth.

That night my dreams were full of Sitting Bull's ruined face and the sound of women wailing. But amidst my troubled slumbers, I thought I could hear a familiar voice calling my name. The voice was distant and feeble, as if the person was trying to yell over the howling of the ice storm. I struggled to identify the voice. And then, with a surge of fear, I realized who it belonged to. It was Digging Woman.

I started awake, terror racing inside me like a live mouse. Something was wrong. Something was horribly, horribly wrong. My horse was close to dead, but I somehow got it to its feet and forced it on its way. A couple hours later it died, collapsing into the snow without so much as a whinny. Although sore and frozen, I kept plowing on through the bitter cold, possessed by a desperate need to reach my wife and child that transcended all rational thought.

I reached my camp on what I later discovered was Christmas Day. The snows had relented, and the pale winter sun shone down on the place I had called home for nearly a decade. Even from a distance I could see the humble two-room cabin where my wife and I first made, then raised, our son in was now nothing more than charcoal and snow-flecked soot. Although the barn had been left standing, the corral was full of dead horses, all of them shot through the head.

I found what was left of my family not far from the ruins of the house. At first I did not see them because they were covered with snow. I tried to cradle Digging Woman's body in my arms, but she was frozen to the ground. She was missing her eyes, tongue, nose, breasts and scalp. Wolf Legs was relatively untouched, save that he'd been skinned from knees to ankles. As if their mutilations were not humiliation enough, their killer had pissed in their wounds.

I dug through the charred remains of my home until I found a kettle. I then took the axe from the barn and chopped a hole in the creek so I could draw water. I built a fire, boiled the water and poured it over the bodies of my wife and child. Even then, it still required all of my inhuman strength to pull them free of the cold, hard ground they had perished on. Sadly, I found it impossible to move their limbs into anything resembling peaceful repose.

The Sioux believe that physical indignity done to a dead body is carried by that person into the Spirit World. The only way to right such a disgrace as was performed on them was via cremation. So I placed them in the hayloft of the barn and set it on fire.

As I tended to the final needs of my family, my face made rigid by a sheet of frozen tears, I promised their spirits I would not rest until I'd avenged their deaths. Judging from the tracks left in the frozen mud of the dooryard, there was only one man. It wasn't hard to figure out where the killer was headed, as he made no effort to hide his tracks. He was moving high into the Bighorns, where the weather would be even heavier and the cold even more extreme.

No one in their right mind would have dared set out under those conditions into such hostile terrain, with almost no food, no horse and no gun. But I wasn't in my right mind—I was crazy. Crazy with grief. Crazy with hate. Crazy with guilt. All I could think of was how my wife and child had suffered under that bastard's knife, and how I would only find peace after I'd torn the life from his body the same way he'd tortured them: slow, mean and evil.

I cut strips of meat from the horses he'd butchered, knowing in advance I was not going to find much in the way of game so late in the season. I did not know if it was possible for one such as me to starve to death, but I was unwilling to weaken myself. I wanted my strength when the time came for me to send the son of a bitch back to whatever Hell he had crawled out of. I figured he had at least a two-day head start on me, and he was on horseback, but I was far from discouraged. I had stalked Apache as a barefoot boy, and tracked renegade Pawnee as a Sioux brave. I was not about to let a blizzard keep me from finding the man responsible for murdering my family.

I struggled along the snow-choked mountain passes for more than three days, trying my best to ignore the frigid winds that bit into my flesh like a whipsaw. During that time, my mind closed inward and began feeding on itself. Without my family to give me purpose and make me whole, I found myself reduced to the level of a beast. Stripped of mercy, hope and love, I stalked my prey through the mountain wilderness with no thought in mind save to taste my enemy's blood. I knew I was getting close when I found a horse stolen from my own corral frozen stiffer than a missionary's dick on the third day.

I spotted the cabin on the fourth day out. I recognized it as belonging to a mountain man that went by the name Clubfoot Charley. I'd traded with him a few times over the years and found him a decent sort, if just a touch mad. There was a thin plume of smoke rising from the chimney, and I wondered if Charley had chosen to stay put to mind his traps instead of ride out the winter in one of his cabins on the lower slope.

I opened the door without knocking. The heat from the potbelly stove struck me like an invisible hand, making my frostbitten ears feel as if I was wearing red-hot coals for earmuffs. The smell of cooking stew wafted from a bubbling pot atop the stove, which made my stomach growl and mouth water. Seated at a crude table next to the stove were two men. Clubfoot Charley sat stripped naked to the waist, his head thrown back, mouth and eyes wide open. If that didn't tell me he was dead, the gaping hole in his chest sure did. Most of his right breast had been carved away, revealing the ribs beneath. Across the table from him sat Witchfinder Jones.

Although I knew the bounty hunter had to be well into his sixties, I saw only the slightest hint of silver in his heavy beard and long, matted hair. A large, puckered scar ran along his left brow, as if someone had roughly shoved the split halves of his skull together and saddle-stitched them shut. His left eye was white as an egg, the pupil gone cloudy, but he was otherwise unchanged from the first time I ever saw him, nearly thirty years before. He was even dressed the same, down to the wolf-skin shirt that had once been my Pa.

“Howdy, Billy,” Jones said. “Long time, no see. You'll have to pardon by dinner companion,” he gestured with his eating utensil. “He wasn't one for the social graces, even when he was breathing. Besides, you've got me at a disadvantage, brother,” Jones smiled, spooning a mouthful of stew into his hairy maw. “I'm in the middle of dinner.”

Despite the days I'd spent fantasizing about what I'd do to my enemy once I caught up with him, I had not been prepared to walk in on such a scene as this.

“You look confused, Billy,” Jones chuckled. “Close the door and pull up a seat, brother. It's colder than a politician's heart out there.”

“I no longer call myself Billy. And I'm not your brother, murderer.”

“Oh, but you
are.
We're as much kin as Cain and Abel. Or haven't you figured that out yet?” He seemed intent on distracting me, toying with me. But I was determined to have none of it.

“I've come to kill you, you murdererin' filth, for what you done to my family!”

Jones smiled a slow, nasty smile that made me want to rip it off his face. “Which family would that be, Billy? The squaw and her half-breed cub, or the werewolf settler and his human bitch?”

“You know who I am, then?”

“Aye, I knew you from the moment I laid eyes on you in McCarthy's cabin, thirty years ago. Just like you recognized your sire's pelt and your dame's teat. Blood knows blood, brother. There's no denying it.”

“Stop callin' me that!” I snarled, bringing my fist down hard on the table. Coarse gray hair sprouted across the backs of my hands and up my arms as my teeth grew longer. “You killed my only brother over forty-five years ago!”

“That boy wasn't your brother,” Jones growled. “He was a servant Howler brought over from the Old Country. In another year or two, he would have undergone the induction ceremony and been ritually castrated, like all human males must be if they are to serve the pack. Don't you remember Grondeur's brace of eunuchs?”

“So who paid you to come after me, bounty hunter?” I growled. “Was it McLaughlin?”

“There's no bounty on you, Billy. I did what I did not for money, but on account of what was done to my mother—and to me.” Jones leaned back in his chair and stroked his shirt like he would a pet, fixing me with his good eye. “How old do you reckon I am?”

“I don't know—sixty-five, perhaps. Although you don't look it.”

Jones gave a short bark of laughter. “I'll be eighty-seven come July!”

“That's impossible!” I snorted.

Jones smiled again, and this time when he spoke, he allowed his accent to come to the fore. “It started in Romania. My mother was a beautiful young woman of gypsy blood. Her people had long served the Masters of Hounds and Bitch Queens of the
vargr.
When a handsome and influential Wolf Lord chose her as his wife, she viewed it as an honor, not a disgrace. My sire kept us in high style, in an isolated chateau, with servants that waited on us hand and foot. I did not have much to do with my sire, as he spent most of his time at the Bitch Queen's floating courts in Paris and Vienna. Then, on my twelfth birthday, he took me to Paris, where I was presented to the Bitch Queen.

“She was indeed a
grand dame,
dressed in lace and expensive silks, her hair fixed with ribbons and smelling of perfume. She looked very young, even though she was older than the kingdoms of Europe. I was so intimidated by her high manner I could do nothing but tremble. As my sire pushed me forward, she sniffed the air about me like a hound scenting a blooded animal. The smile on her face faded and grew cold. The Bitch Queen then turned to my sire and said: ‘You have not bred true, Howler. The whelp is
esau.'

“I'll never forget the look my sire gave me. Although sired by a
vargr,
the human blood in me was too strong. While I might possess the instincts, the needs and the hunger of a true-born
vargr,
I could never shapeshift. Because of that, I could never run with the pack. And, as such, I was useless to my sire. I was imperfect—a mongrel of the worst sort. The pride and hope that had been in his eyes a moment before was suddenly gone, replaced by a loathing that stung like a bundle of nettles. It was as if I had done something so terrible, so disgusting, it curdled whatever love he ever felt for me. Howler no longer had any use for me or my mother, who had not produced any further live issue over the years. Without any further ado, he turned us out of the chateau with nothing more than the clothes on our backs.

“My mother, no longer young and made unattractive by her failed pregnancies, tried to go back to her people. They would have nothing to do with her, as she had willingly consorted with an unnatural thing. They were especially hostile to me, since I bore the Mark of Beast.” Jones explained, gesturing to his thick eyebrows and hairy palms. “My mother was never a strong woman, and the years spent pampered by my sire did not prepare her for such cruelty. Cast aside by the
vargr
and shunned by her own people, it was not long before she lost her mind completely.

“She began to believe that she was, indeed, the devil's mistress and began threatening the local villagers, demanding tribute in the form of food or money, or she would put the Evil Eye on them. It worked at first. But, in her madness, she eventually went too far. The townspeople stopped being frightened and began to get angry. She was accused of being a witch and hanged at the crossroads of a village in Transylvania. I would have died with her as well, but I somehow managed to escape the mob. It was then I decided to vent my rage on the unnatural world by becoming a witchfinder. After all, vampires, werewolves and ghouls hold no horror for one such as me.

“I might be incapable of shapeshifting, but I am a
vargr
born.” He rapped his chest with a clenched fist. “The blood of the Wolf Lords runs strong in my veins. I do not age like mortal men, and I have suffered wounds that would have killed a normal human three times over.” Jones leaned forward, his single eye gleaming in the dim light of the cabin like a polished stone. “I was raised on the taste of human flesh, taught to view them as cattle to be herded and culled, only to have my sire cast me aside, without help or guidance. I swore one day I would make him pay for the cruelty he had shown both me and my mother. And I made good on that oath in 1844, when I tracked Howler and his latest wife to the wilds of Texas. It wasn't hard. He'd been preying on a few of the Spanish ranchers in the area. They were more than ready to believe me when I told them it was the work of
lobo hombre,
especially if the guilty party was a gringo.