by Holley Trent
The little one with the face still crumpled from birth who was struggling to open her eyes.
“She’ll be good, yes?” Better than I was.
Rachel laughed and took the baby from Lola when her body seized again with a contraction.
The afterbirth. Lola got on hands and knees to help her body along.
“She’ll be better than all of us,” Rachel said with a chuckle, echoing Lola’s thoughts. “We’ll keep her out of trouble.”
“We sure will,” Elizabeth said. “I’m gonna write a book about us, in fact. So she knows who to avoid.”
“That may help.” Weary, Lola sat back on her haunches and let out a breath.
Rachel was cleaning up the baby a bit more as Elizabeth looked on.
Lola wanted Angela back in her arms. She wanted to go to Yaotl and show her what she’d made without knowing—to show him his sister. But that would take days. Her body needed to mend enough for her to make the trip.
She did have something to do while the Cougars cooed and before she needed to take Angela at breast.
She reached for the knife Rachel had abandoned and snipped the umbilical cord free clean from the placenta.
Some Aztecs had believed that burying the cord near the hearth in the home would make a woman grow up to be a good wife and mother. Given her own dissatisfying experiences with partners, the first thing didn’t hold any appeal to her.
She cut it in half, though. She wanted Angela to be a better mother than she’d been, and she’d teach her what mistakes not to make, though she was bound to make thousands more.
She crawled to the fireplace and lifted a short floorboard nearby. Tired as she was, she raked at the hard soil beneath, ignoring the disturbed bugs and worms to make a capsule-shaped hole. Gently, she placed half cord inside and said a prayer to whichever gods remained that cared about the fates of little girls. She covered it and staggered to her feet.
“I will return.” She limped to the door clutching the other half of the cord. “I need to bury this.”
Outside of the wards, because Aztecs also believed that if they buried a little boy’s umbilical cord outside, they would grow up to be roamers.
Lola wanted Angela to be whatever she wanted to be. She wanted her to be both strong and soft, and she could be either at her discretion. No one would limit her. No one was going to get in her way, especially not her father.
Weak-limbed, she fell to her knees about a quarter mile from the house and dug. She sang to herself as she did and watched the cheery pink of Elizabeth’s skirt flutter in the breeze as she hustled to the ranch house to make the announcement.
Everyone would want to see the baby. Very few of them knew who Lola really was. She was just another Cougar to them, and they all thought the father was some unnamed guest from the brothel.
She didn’t care. She enjoyed the relative anonymity and enjoyed the normalness of being on the fringes instead of in the center of things. Watching was nice. Knowing she could engage whenever she felt like doing so was comforting.
“There,” she said, patting the mounded soil firm. “Do what you like, angel, but harm none.”
She was staggering back to the house, holding her stained dress between her legs to staunch the bleeding when she heard the click behind her and then the clop-clop-clop of hooves atop hard soil.
She hadn’t heard the horse. Hadn’t sensed the presence.
So…very tired.
“Where’d you come from, woman?” came the rough voice behind her.
Holding her dress tighter, she swallowed and licked her lips.
One of the sheriff’s thugs.
Being very still, she listened and noted more movement behind him. More thumps. Soft whinnies from their horses. The clicks of more gun hammers being cocked.
She was just one woman, and they all had their big guns pointed at her. She didn’t have to turn to see. She knew how they were.
Having no cares, she dropped her skirt and let the blood flow freely. Her bodice was loose, and the breeze played against her sweaty back. Damp and matted hair flopped into her face. Her swollen and bare feet ached.
She turned slowly to them, clutching her fists at her side.
The lead rider’s face crinkled in disgust as the stains on her caught his gaze.
He didn’t lower his gun, though. His job was to scare her and anyone he found off the property, in spite of who rightfully owned the land.
There were three of them. Rough-looking men with poor coats and age-worn hats. Boots with thin soles. Cold eyes.
The only things about them that were new were the guns and the horses, the latter of which had obviously been fed and kept well.
“I asked you where you came from,” the man said.
“No hablo inglés,” Lola returned.
“What she say?” he asked the rider at his right.
The man shrugged. “Ask her with your gun. That’ll make her understand.”
Lola dug her nails into her palms and held her ground. She’d been threatened in worse ways in the past.
The leader must have thought his friend’s idea was a fine one. He leaned his gun a bit more against his shoulder and squeezed one eye shut like he was lining her up in a shot.
She stared up at him, unmoved.
She’d just given birth and there was blood pooling at her feet. Her body was still cramping and trying to set itself to rights. Her back ached like hell.
Women were always forced to work through pain. In her estimation, those men were just work for her to do.
“Where you come from?” he asked her.
She sang a bit of Amazing Grace in Spanish, toying with him and seeing if he’d catch the melody.
“Stop it,” he said.
She sang louder, putting special emphasis on the “wretch like me” part.
“She’s out her mind,” the thug on the left said. “Shoot her and move on. Doubt anyone’ll miss her.”
“Doubt anyone’ll miss her,” she mimed and grinned at him like she deserved applause for the mockery.
He bared his teeth at her, so she bared hers, too.
But hers were longer. Hers could rip though bone and solid muscle, and the owners of that flesh didn’t even need to be dead for her to do it.
“What the—”
He raised his gun and she mimicked doing the same. But she had no gun. Just her hands.
She didn’t have anything else, except what was Yaotl’s, and she wouldn’t touch that.
All she had was her words and her body. If she took a cat’s body, she could probably unsettle them enough to lessen the accuracy of their shots, but the fact of the matter was that she was still vastly outnumbered.
She didn’t see where she had a choice, though.
Before she was on all fours, she let her body settle into its most agile form. Her affinity was to large cats. She’d always be able to take the shape of one, even when her magic had left her. It was part of her primordial DNA. She could take many shapes. Jaguar had been her first, but Cougar was her most comfortable.
“What the hell is that?”
Bullets exploded from chambers and Lola kept moving. She wove herself between the skittish horses’ legs until they’d thrown their riders.
They got up and scrambled for their guns.
Lola hissed at them, looking at each in turn, wondering whose neck she’d rip out first.
She decided it didn’t matter. They were all garbage.
She leapt for the closest, but he turned as she landed because there’d been a gunshot.
Lola braced herself for the delayed realization that she’d been hit, but the pain didn’t come.
Blood splattered from meters away.
And there was tussling. Grunting.
There was a wordless, feminine shout of frustration, and not from Lola.
The thug tossed Lola off as the other man’s lifeless form hit the ground.
And there Sophie stood with the late Mr. Foye’s second-best rifle, panting, hissi
ng, and out of bullets.
He knew. He must have counted.
He lifted his gun to his shoulder.
Lola prepared to pounce.
Growling, Sophie stormed over in hypnotizing defiance, flipped her borrowed gun and knocked the stunned man across the face with the butt.
For a couple of seconds, he stared cross-eyed at her.
She hit him hard again—so hard that his skull split.
He dropped to the ground.
Sophie gaped wordlessly at the bloodbath of her making and looked at Lola with shock.
Wearily, Lola shifted back into her standard shape and cleared her throat. She picked up her dress, scrunched it up between her thighs, and said to the shaken aristocrat, “Are your palms burned?”
Dazed, Sophie looked at them. “A bit. Yes.”
“Balm will help, but they’ll likely heal on their own in a few hours. I suppose it is time you learn about a Cougar’s rate of healing.”
“I just…killed three men.”
“Yes.”
“I just…killed three men.”
Lola remained silent that time. She didn’t think it mattered if she responded or not. Sophie was going to have to work out the circumstances on her own. She may not have been born a Cougar, but she had all the right instincts. Perhaps it was all that anger she’d been bottling up her entire life. It had to go somewhere eventually.
“They were going to hurt you,” Sophie said. “I couldn’t let them do that. How…uncivilized of them. Coming here and trying to murder a woman. Christ, you’re nearly naked. I hope they go straight to hell.”
“They have certainly paved their own road to there.”
Sophie took a bracing breath, looked about her, and picked up the guns the men had carried. She took their bullets and piled everything into a sack she found on the one horse that had been brave enough to return after the fright Lola had given them.
She cleared her throat. “I…I’d like to see about Angela’s weight now. Should we just leave them here, or…”
“For now. We’ll send over one of the Cougar men. He can strap them to their horses and steer them back toward town.”
“Aren’t you worried about the sheriff coming out here to look around? You’re going to have to pull back some of your magic, aren’t you? You’re not safe like that.”
“No, I’m not worried,” Lola said, staring toward the house. “I wish he would come. It will save me the trip into town to deal with him myself.”
Three days. She was going to give her body three days to mend enough for her to run, and leap, and kick, if she needed to. She was going to burn everything he’d acquired to the ground and dance in the ashes because Maria was hers, not his.
She might even smile while she did it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Tarik set the tired shifters down back where they’d started in Maria and shoved his hands into his duster pockets with frustration.
Oscar, doubled over and wheezing, put up a hand and uttered, “Wait.”
“Wait for what?” Tarik snapped. His patience was short, and he’d been feeling increasingly unsettled in recent days. He didn’t know why. Something had simply changed in the balance of the universe, or in his energy, or…something. He couldn’t describe what had transpired, but there seemed to be a void in him that hadn’t been there before and it hadn’t been caused by anything he’d done.
“Just give us a minute, huh? We’ve been all over the place. Pardon us for needing a little recovery time.” Silvio helped Oscar get upright and propped him against his side. He had a little more energy to spare than Oscar had, which was good, Tarik supposed. It boded well for Rachel’s son.
“I’m here for clues,” Tarik said. “Not rest. Truly, I appreciate your assistance, but you have to understand that time is of the essence. Once she slips through my fingers, it may be centuries before I find her again. The only reason I was able to easily locate her the first few times after we were acquainted was because she wasn’t trying to hide.”
“So, you think she’s hiding now?”
Tarik ground his teeth. He didn’t understand her capriciousness or what he’d done to merit such treatment. He’d only been trying to give her the best of himself. Perhaps he was still learning, but she was making it difficult to persevere. Why be good if she wasn’t there to oversee his piousness? What would be the point of all that effort? “She must be.”
“Well, let’s put things in perspective.” Oscar walked to the edge of the alley and peeked out on the main street. It was dark. He couldn’t be seeing much, and that was a good thing. Fewer people out and about meant fewer witnesses for them.
They were going to be suspicious-looking no matter where they went. A big, scowling Black man with a twitching shoulder, a swarthy, barefooted Cougar, and a Werewolf who likely hadn’t held a comb in a year.
Tarik mused wryly that the Wild West was the perfect venue for a trio of vagabonds like them.
“Lola’s not going to go far,” Oscar said. “She’s stayed here because she wants to be in the same place so her son can find her. She’s going to come back.”
“So I should just wait?” Tarik asked. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“What’s time to an angel?” Silvio asked with a chuckle. “Isn’t that what you said yesterday when I asked why you were gone so long? You said time didn’t mean anything to you when you were working.”
Tarik regretted saying that. He’d spoken impulsively. While it was true that when he was in between realms, his concept of time didn’t play out the same as it did when he was in the human realm, he recognized that the people on the outside registered it. And Lola had probably been counting hours. Days. Weeks and months. She’d probably thought he didn’t care, and that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
He loved that woman. Every breath he took was a testament to putting her back where she belonged—in his orbit. Antagonizing him. Scolding him. Teasing him. Being so fucking curious about him.
She would never be more curious than he was about his pretty little enigma.
Tarik rolled his aching shoulder back and stepped into the street. “If I have to wake every person in this town to ask if they’ve seen her, I will.”
“We could start with the sheriff,” Silvio said. “Get that bit over and done with. Did you figure out how you want to kill him yet?”
Oscar stopped in the middle of the road, eyes wide and pupils dilated, hands gripping Tarik and Silvio’s forearms. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” Tarik asked.
He pointed. Upstairs in the former saloon, there was a bright orange light. Fire, Tarik thought at first, but then it moved past the window with a human sort of sentience.
It backtracked and seemed to pause there in front of the glass for seconds before moving away.
But when it left, flames were dancing up the curtains and a dark plume of smoke billowed out of the narrow gap of the open window.
Tarik had barely put the pieces together in his mind before every window on the second floor blew out.
The shifters threw their arms over their faces for cover.
Tarik walked toward the building, banking his own fire.
I see how it is, then.
Screaming ladies in night shifts and shirtless men with suspenders hanging loose ran out of the neighboring buildings. Realizing what was happening, some ran back in and quickly tossed their valuables through the open windows and doors. Others went to fetch their horses.
“Help us, damn it!” one of the men shouted at Tarik as he approached.
Tarik peered into the blaze of the rapidly disintegrating building and watched the fiery shape of a woman casually walk forward. Her fingers grazed the stair banister as she moved, sparking another unnecessary fire that quickly consumed the old wood.
She stood just behind the doorway, peering at him. He couldn’t see her features through the flames. Couldn’t see those dark, assessing eyes that always said so much.
All he saw was fire and for the first time in his life, he couldn’t read the flames.
She didn’t step outside. She burned through the wall into the neighboring building.
Those residents were already outside, crying and wailing and clutching their paintings and purses and pearls. They were unfamiliar to Tarik. They hadn’t been there before he’d left.
“Someone do something!” the man shouted, approaching Tarik. “Get water or sand to throw on it. Try to put it out!”
“Your arms work fine,” Tarik said.
“B-b-but—” the man sputtered.
“Shut up.”
Up ahead, Tarik saw another woman-shaped figure in front of a building that hadn’t caught fire yet. It was only a matter of time. The entire block was going to go up in flame soon.
She pounded on the door and shouted, “Your place is on fire. Get your valuables and get out.”
“Rachel,” Silvio murmured. He dropped his sack and darted toward the Cougar.
He was stopped, though, by the sudden appearance of two female cats who had fangs bared and looks of murderous intent in their eyes.
More screaming from the locals.
Shotguns produced.
More Cats streaming in from alleyways and dark corners.
Tarik saw the sheriff hustling his wife into a carriage and trying to get control of his frightened team of horses. In the chaos, none of the Cougars seemed to notice. They were too busy herding out the new settlers and putting the fear of the Wild West into them. They all probably thought it was a typical New Mexican disaster: that if the Indians didn’t kill them, the animals or the landscape would.
Perhaps they’d all go back to New York or Boston or Baltimore or wherever the hell they’d come from and tell the rest of the would-be travelers not to bother. Maria wasn’t for them.
The sheriff wasn’t getting out of town unscathed, though. He’d tried to implement his own code of justice in the frontier, and he was going to learn exactly what that self-serving credo of his could do to him.
Tarik edged around the moaning and complaining crowds and trod through the Cougars who parted to give him a clear path.
He pulled his sword as he moved. His gaze fixed on the former sheriff’s increasingly more agitated transfer of possessions into his carriage.