Wake of Vultures

by Lila Bowen

  “You didn’t bring him here to break broncs, Dan. Said he needed to hunt a monster. So you figure we’ll, what? Teach him? Help him? Shit, Dan. This ain’t no charity house.”

  “It’s not charity if you put him to work. He’s good with horses. Killed two monsters before he even knew what they were. Should’ve died five times this week but didn’t. He belongs with the Rangers.”

  The Captain spit a long stream of tobacco juice into the dirt; it appeared to be his main form of punctuation. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but he’s the wrong damn color.”

  Softly but firmly, Dan said, “If a man can do his job, it shouldn’t matter what color he is.”

  “That’s right philosophical for a Injun. And more than a little self-serving. You know, if you’re looking to come back and scout for us, you’ll have to fight Jiddy first.”

  Jiddy stepped forward, arms crossed over a barrel chest sprouting thick hair through his shirt.

  Dan chuckled, which only made Jiddy angrier. “No thanks, Captain. My path leads elsewhere. But you should take Rhett on like you took me on. His skills are unusual, and you always need more unusual men.”

  At that, the Captain laughed, a loud bark that startled the stars. “You heard we got hit hard at the Battle of Bandera Pass, huh? Well, yeah, and we’re doing poorly in numbers, you nosy bastard. Jiddy, what do you reckon? Should we take him on?”

  Jiddy stepped close. “Can you shoot?”

  “Yep.”

  “Can you fight?”

  Nettie shrugged. “I can stab a monster in the heart. Probably stab a man, too.”

  “You look like you eat a lot.”

  She looked down at herself. Another shrug. “I don’t know where you think I’m putting it. But I can cook beans and eggs, kill and roast a rabbit, or fry up biscuits. I ain’t above eatin’ snake.”

  The Captain aimed a finger at her chest and stepped closer, so close that she could see the spots on his nose in the moonlight.

  “What makes you think you’re worthy of being a Durango Ranger, Rhett?”

  “Didn’t say I thought I was. But I’m bound to hunt the Cannibal Owl, and if it kills me because you wouldn’t help, I’ll haunt you until you’re cold in the ground.” She looked to Dan. “I can do that, right?”

  Coyote Dan shrugged.

  Far off, a woman screamed, and the men went on point like hounds, guns out of holsters. Dan whipped his horse around, ears twitching.

  “What the Hades was that?” the Captain shouted.

  Jiddy pointed far off, to the butte where Winifred had been hiding in her coyote form, last time Nettie had seen her. Looking now, her blood went cold. A stark black silhouette against the moonlit clouds showed the Injun woman pointing west, seated on the back of the black mare. Something lumpy lay over the ghostly horse’s rump. An animal. Or a body.

  Dan muttered, “Not again,” kicked his horse, and galloped for the butte, screaming a war cry as he readied his bow and knocked an arrow at a full run. It was the most Injun-like Nettie’d seen him act so far, and she spun Ragdoll and took off after him, whipping the horse with her reins as she pulled out her pistol. She’d never forced the mare to run so hard, but it felt like they were moving in water, slow and cold. Far ahead, the dark horse turned, dripping water, and disappeared over the side of the butte. Dan launched an arrow right where they’d been seconds before and threw his bow to the ground.

  A few strides ahead of her, Dan hit the mesquite thicket and leaped off his horse. Before Nettie had pulled up, he was on the ground on his knees, keening. He stood and turned, a large bundle in his arms.

  It was a limp body. A woman with long hair, dripping water, smelling like salt.

  Winifred.

  CHAPTER

  14

  There was, of course, no way Winifred could’ve drowned in the middle of the desert. Dan laid her on the ground, nekkid as a jaybird, and pressed her stomach until no more water streamed out of her lips. Nettie was cold all over, her knees soaked in the little river flowing off the coyote girl’s skin. Dan ran his hands over her body, put his ear to her heart. About that time, the Captain moseyed up with his fellers and tapped Dan on the shoulder.

  “May I?”

  Dan looked like he might grow out his coyote teeth and bite the older man, but instead he flared his nostrils, nodded once, and stood. Nettie watched closely as the Captain kneeled, folded his hands over the beautiful girl’s nekkid chest, and started pressing down hard enough to make her ribs creak in a rhythmic sort of way that reminded Nettie of the sounds of the whores’ beds upstairs at the Leaping Lizard. Much to her surprise, he next spit out a big wad of tobacco and leaned over to kiss the girl, his mouth wide over hers. Nettie went for her holstered gun, but Dan’s hand on her shoulder stopped her.

  “I trust him. So should you.”

  It was downright unsettling, watching an old white man kiss an Injun girl, especially considering she was nekkid and dead.

  Something brushed Nettie’s elbow, and she jumped. The anxiety didn’t go away when she realized it was Hennessy squatting beside her. He gave her a reassuring smile that only made her more nervous.

  “Don’t worry. Captain knows what he’s doing,” he said.

  All she could do was nod.

  After a few long moments, the Captain went back to pressing Winifred’s chest, and Nettie scanned the butte for the Injun woman and the wet black horse, but of course they were long gone. That meant she wasn’t watching when Winifred sucked in a whooping breath and upchucked water, raw rabbit, and roasted snake meat all over the Captain’s lap.

  Nettie stood as the Captain helped Winifred sit up, graciously offering her a blanket one of his fellers had brought, probably to cover up what had looked like a dead body. The girl wrapped herself in the blanket and bent her head to Dan’s. The language they spoke was low and liquid, and Winifred had to stop several times and cough up more water.

  Finally, Coyote Dan turned to the Captain, one arm still around his sister. “That ghost will haunt Rhett until the Cannibal Owl is destroyed. If you don’t help him on this quest, I suspect it’ll haunt you, as well. Might be one of your boys, next time, and yours don’t come back to life so easy.”

  “Bullshit,” the Captain muttered, but Jiddy nudged him and inclined his head toward their ranch house. Just beside it was a familiar black shadow, a woman on horseback, that danged ghostly finger pointing, as ever to the west.

  The Captain pulled a tobacco pouch from his belt and lumbered toward the house. “Damn monsters. No sense of a man’s privacy. Come on then, boy. Make yourself useful. Best get back to the bunks before Delgado drowns in his beans, not that I reckon it’s possible to drown in something so blasted hard and dry.”

  “You don’t need to be wet to drown,” Winifred called, one hand to her throat. “But being human would certainly make it more final.”

  “Evening, miss.” The Captain stopped, tipped his hat, wiped his mouth off, and kept walking.

  Nettie looked uncertainly from Dan and Winifred to the men following their leader back to what was left of dinner and what was probably a better place to sleep than the ground by a mesquite thicket full of snake-flecked yark and salty mud.

  “Go.” Dan tightened his sorrel’s saddle and held the horse so his sister could mount. She’d slipped on her leather top and bottoms and maneuvered herself so that she was sitting on the Captain’s old blanket but also mostly wrapped in it.

  “She gonna be all right?”

  Dan gave the strangest smile. “She always is.”

  Nettie gave him the side eye. “You mean she’s died before?”

  He shrugged. “Yes, and she’ll die again. A panther shaman put a curse on her. Nine deaths, the last one final. Damn cats. That’s why I keep begging her to go back to town with the white men, where it’s relatively safe. It’s easier to die alone, out here. She needs someone around to bring her back.”

  “What’s a panther shaman? And why did it curse her?”

>   “That’s my business and mine alone,” Winifred snapped. She kicked Dan’s horse and didn’t look back as the gelding walked away.

  “Are you just gonna leave me here?” Nettie’s voice sounded smaller than she would have liked.

  Dan whistled, and his sorrel turned and trotted obediently back to him, despite Winifred’s yanking on the reins. He hopped up behind his sister, settling on the horse’s rump. “It was my job to bring you. I brought you. And now I have my own problems to deal with.”

  A peculiar wash of anger, shame, and disappointment flooded through Nettie and dug into her chest, right where the Captain had punched with the heels of his hands to bring Winifred back to life. It wasn’t that she had expected Coyote Dan to stick around forever, nor that she wanted him to. She just hadn’t expected him to dump her off in the night, tossed out like a chicken bone.

  “Fine, then. Go on.” She mounted her horse, and headed for the nearest corral by the ranch house.

  “Good fortune,” Winifred called.

  “I’ll be watching,” Dan added, but Nettie just flapped a tired hand.

  She didn’t need an audience. She needed a friend.

  By the time Nettie had Ragdoll fed and rubbed down and had found a place for her saddle, the lights were out in the bunkhouse. No one ever came out to greet her or help her, not even Sam. She took it as a test because that was the only way to keep it from feeling like a slight. At least she didn’t have to rush herself in the outhouse, where she savored a rare sit-down piss and the good fortune of a scrap of old newspaper to wipe with. Compared to where she’d come from, the Ranger camp was right fancy.

  Staring up at the bunkhouse, bone tired, she couldn’t help missing her narrow bunk at the Double TK, surrounded by the deep snores of dangerous men. She started to open the bunkhouse door but nudged it back shut when it let out a squeak of protest. Better to sleep outside and brave the elements than piss off a surly top hand and get sent to break the hellbitches or be the first to scout out a camp of hungry vampires. With her saddle blanket over her arm, she dusted off a spot on the porch and settled down, her eyes focused on the butte.

  At least the Injun woman and the water horse had gone to pester and half-kill someone else tonight. Maybe having the hunt settled with the Rangers would be enough to calm the ghost’s damn bones.

  Lying there, she rubbed the place where Dan had doctored the mesquite thorn. Damned if it didn’t feel better, not hot or hard at all. When she unwrapped Monty’s bandanna, she found barely a bump. Whatever medicine Dan had used had most likely saved her life. Which only meant she owed him more.

  That night, Nettie dreamed that she was dressed in hoop skirts and silk, her long blonde hair tong-curled and braided intricately around her milk-white face and her satin slippers slightly too small. In the dream, she was escorted into the town hall, where she danced a waltz with Samuel Hennessy and made small talk with other white ladies about the price of white sugar.

  It was the worst nightmare of her life.

  The next few days were about the same as her days at the Double TK. Well, aside from the hours they spent rolling around and stabbing broke-off chair legs into sandbag dummies with painted-on hearts. And when they practiced shooting pistols backward over their shoulders using mirrors, in case they had to face another nest of gorgons or a cockatrice. Or when Nettie was sent in to break a bronc that had a snapped-off horn and a lion’s tail.

  “Unicorns make damn fine mounts, if you cut off their horns first. Almost nobody can shoot a unicorn out from under you, that’s for damn sure,” Jiddy said as he handed her a rope and a halter. “Unless they take a shot to the heart, they’ll keep running and fighting forever. Damn hard to break, though. Go on in, new boy. Let’s see what you got.”

  What he neglected to mention was that the goddamn beast could use its tail as a whip. Nettie took it as a personal triumph when the critter finally gentled and trotted around under her, lifting dirty white knees like it was dancing in a town parade. Turned out unicorns were just prouder than the usual horses, and as soon as she started whispering praise into its daintily curved ears, it perked right up.

  Another day, Jiddy used a heavy key to unlock a weathered building Nettie had taken for a storage shed or a secondary bunkhouse. The room had no windows and was full of trunks, odd weapons, and collections of strange beasts that weren’t human but weren’t normal, either. One cage had rabbits with fangs, one had overlarge roosters with burlap sacks tightly tied over their heads, and a large jar with holes in the top had butterflies with skulls for heads and huge stingers. Nettie learned so much by the light of Jiddy’s lantern that her head ached. Cockatrices, Death’s Head moths, pixies, bloodbunnies, bugbears, fiery salamanders. Since she couldn’t read, she had to memorize each creature’s name, habitat, and defenses, and how to kill it before it killed her. Every day she spent with the Rangers left her exhausted and bruised, but since she never took off her clothes, she didn’t have cause to notice.

  Most of the men were official Durango Rangers and kept their little brass badges clean and shiny. The few younger ones, those who hadn’t seen battle, all but worshipped the ones who had and whispered about how each man had earned his badge with feats of ridiculous valor. A few of the more grizzled veterans wore necklaces strung with teeth and talons too big and strange to have come from normal animals, which they were always finding an excuse to pull out and expose for praise and awe.

  At first, Nettie reckoned they were lying, considering Dan had told her that a monster dissolved all to dust when it was killed. But then she remembered the vampire fangs in the bag hanging at her waist and figured maybe some creatures left something behind, if you took the time to sift through the sand. For once, she was glad her time with Pap had trained her to keep her mouth shut, as it didn’t pay to question a man about his skills, even if you figured him for a goddamn braggart.

  In this case, he was still a braggart, but one who’d killed far more dangerous things than Nettie Lonesome. Or Rhett Hennessy, as she had to constantly remind herself. She didn’t speak much at all among the Rangers, in fact. Just nodded along, did as she was told, and tried her damnedest to learn whatever they took the time to teach her. It was hard going, but she’d expected that. She missed the hell out of Monty, though, and the easy way she’d sat with him and Poke and Jar, joshing as they worked.

  Although breakfast and dinner were provided, the Rangers had to find their own lunch. The Captain believed it kept them sharp on foraging, a skill a man could use out on the plains. As Nettie—goddammit, Rhett—had finally run out of Dan’s jerky and hadn’t brought anything with her but the spare weapons and stained clothes in her saddlebags, she set off toward a mesquite clutch to look for some sort of eatin’ varmint. On the way, she was overtaken by the long legs and sure smile of Samuel Hennessy. He made her feel right strange, which meant she’d been avoiding him… but which also meant she was glad to see him. Matching her stride, he held out a strip of jerky.

  “Figured you might be hungry, other Hennessy. Takes most folks a while to get used to finding their own supper on a ranch that’s already been stripped of critters.”

  Their fingertips brushed as she took the meat and nodded. “Thanks kindly, other Hennessy.”

  He pointed at the bushes ahead. “You won’t find any rabbits this way. We cleaned ’em all out.”

  Nettie stopped and stared at the little green smudge in the large prairie, calculating. “Any fish in the creek?”

  “Too muddy.”

  “Prairie chickens? Snakes?”

  “Ugh. Who eats snakes?”

  She snorted. Hennessy had likely never been hungry a second in his life. If a feller who looked like him got hungry, folks would probably line up to cut off a chunk of muscle and drop it in his bowl.

  “Plenty of starving folks who can’t find rabbits or hens will eat a snake, I reckon. I’ll show you how to cook one, if you want.”

  He scratched the blond stubble on his throat. The sound did p
eculiar, fluttery things to Nettie’s belly, things she didn’t quite understand. And it made her a mite jealous, as she’d like to’ve had some manly stubble to scratch in a thoughtful manner herself.

  “What do they taste like?”

  “Like meat. Better than starving.”

  Hennessy took a deep breath and shrugged wide shoulders. He couldn’t have been even nineteen, but he seemed so much older and more experienced than Nettie felt. And yet there was something innocent about him, too. “Guess it’d be a good skill to know. How do we start?”

  Nettie’s life, until that point, had been missing out on fun. But with Hennessy cracking jokes and lending a hand, even catching a six-foot-long fanged viper was pretty entertaining. She showed him how to skin it inside out and skewer it on a twig, like Dan did, and he showed her how to build a better fire and light it with a bit of flint. Most comical of all was the face he made the first time he held a chunk of steaming snake meat up, glaring at it like it could still bite, even without a mouth and fangs.

  “You’re sure this ain’t poison?”

  Nettie held up her chunk and bit in, juice running down her chin.

  “If it is, bury me under a shady tree, will you?”

  Hennessy shivered. “We don’t bury nobody. Always burn ’em.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He looked past the ranch house to a blackened stain on the prairie that Nettie had noticed but not remarked upon. “Because sometimes, fellers come back. And they’re a damn sight harder to kill the second time around.” He went oddly silent, staring at that black splotch, and it made Nettie feel downright twitchy.

  “How’d you end up with the Rangers? Weren’t you…” She almost slipped and asked him about where he’d gone after the Double TK, but seeing as how he hadn’t recognized her yet, she wasn’t about to mention it. “Weren’t you pretty young to join up?”