Wake of Vultures

by Lila Bowen

  “You scared of me, woman?”

  It was all she could do to nod as greedy fingers pulled at one teat and then the next.

  “Good,” he said, then turned to Sam. “She ain’t worth much. Two scrawny Rangers, maybe. My choice.”

  Sam closed his eyes and swallowed hard. Nettie knew as well as he did that the two scrawniest Rangers were also the youngest, the least proven in battle, and the worst with a pistol. But she also instinctively understood that once you got this close to a werewolf, you took the deal or you took a throat full of his teeth. Nettie put her chin up and looked over the feller’s shoulder as he reached down her britches and prodded her like half a pig he was thinking of stringing up to smoke. Far away, where the sky was going purple with evening, a dark figure on horseback raised a hand in warning. Nettie exhaled and felt something deep inside her curl up like a dead bug.

  “Pure,” the man said. “Tight. Maybe not worth two Rangers, though.”

  “Fine,” Sam muttered. “Take her. She’s unspoilt, but she’s good with her hands, if you know what I mean. Take the horse, too.”

  As if he wished her dead, Sam untied the pony’s rope and tossed it to the Lobo feller, who gave it a hard tug that upset the black pony and nearly unseated Nettie. When he knelt to run hands up the pony’s legs with more interest and approval than he’d given her, she had to hold herself back from kicking him in the face. Standing, he nodded in satisfaction, whistled, held up two fingers to his crew, and gabbled at them in a language of grunts and swallows.

  “You. You. Go that way, fast,” said the Lobo closest to the Rangers. He pointed into the crowd, at two of the most useless fellers. They mounted up right quick and galloped off in the direction the Lobo had pointed. Knowing them, Nettie was amazed that they managed to stay on horseback, riding that fast.

  As for Nettie, she kept her head down. Not only so the Rangers maybe wouldn’t recognize her, but also to keep her disappointment from showing. The Captain and his best men were still trapped in an ever-smaller circle of panicked horses, surrounded by Injuns who clearly enjoyed messing with their captives like a kitten playing with a half-dead mouse. So far, her cunning idea was not going according to plan, and she still felt the sick burn of the man’s hands on her skin. It was only going to get worse. Sam couldn’t help her now; she was on her own.

  “You go that way,” the Lobo said to Sam, and Sam obligingly took off at breakneck speed without another word. It would’ve been easy for Nettie to believe he was well and truly glad to get rid of her if she hadn’t seen the sweat dripping off his nose just before he’d turned to go.

  The Lobo leader pulled her pony’s rope, and the black stepped so close to his paint that Nettie’s leg was nearly touching his chest. No chance of escape there. He untied the knot around her wrists easily and retied it in a tight, complicated knot that required far less rope. With the remaining bit of the lead, he tied a loop around Sam’s pony’s neck, effectively tethering her to the damn thing. When he was satisfied that she couldn’t roll off and run, he mounted up and pulled her pony near. The two horses touched noses and squealed their dislike, and he laughed as the other feller came up behind Nettie’s horse, trapping her. The men spoke in their language and laughed, and the satisfied grunt of the feller behind her told her maybe he’d just been given the privilege of second in line.

  For the first time, Nettie wished she’d taken the whores up on their offer. A set of fangs would be mighty fine, right now. At least she’d be facing these monsters as equals, or something like it, instead of as a piece of soft meat to be toyed with and devoured.

  “You should not trust white men,” the Lobo said to her, as if they’d been having a regular conversation and she’d trade two horse turds for his thoughts.

  “Never said I did.”

  He laughed and gave her a sharper glance, and she cursed herself for not holding her tongue.

  “I am Scorpion,” he said, watching her like a hawk for some response, which she didn’t offer. “Behind you, that is Black Fang. You know what we are?”

  She nodded.

  “You know what we gonna do to you?”

  She swallowed, shivered, and shook her head. “Don’t want to know,” she muttered.

  He laughed again and kicked his pony to a trot. Uneasy as she felt and leggy as Sam’s pony was, Nettie now had a hard time sitting the jig without use of her hands. The other Lobos rode out to meet them, the men circling their ponies around her and whooping and shaking their lances and bows.

  One of them was reaching for her open shirt when another screeched an alarm, and they both wheeled and took off for the Rangers. One of the Ranger fellers had broken free of the circle and was riding hellbent for the west. Three of the werewolves took off after him, and as they passed the circle of horses, the Captain’s Henry barked and took one down to a puff of black sand. Scorpion’s head rippled to a wolf’s muzzle, and he growled and bared his teeth at Nettie. She didn’t have to pretend to be scared shitless, staring into those utterly alien yellow eyes. When his fur rippled back into skin, he reached out with a huge knife and took Sam’s black pony down with one nasty slice across the throat.

  “Stay here or die, woman.”

  Hennessy’s pony collapsed under her, and Nettie hit the ground in a roll, barely missing having her leg crushed by the thrashing gelding. As if the Lobo had planned it, the horse had fallen on the rope that bound her wrists, and she did her damn best to loosen any of the knots and failed. Tethered this close to a dying beast, she couldn’t even get to the knife in her boot. And she couldn’t stop crying. No matter how hard she tried to play a man, she had a soft heart for horses and a dire hatred of any creature who killed so easily and uselessly.

  As she worked her hands back and forth, trying to get some play and rubbing bloody welts into her wrists, she tried to track what was happening between the Rangers and the Lobos. She couldn’t tell which feller had started the break, but now two more fellers were riding at a full run in opposite directions, away from the circle of Rangers and toward the scrub and mountains. Far as she could tell, that made Hennessy, the two green fellers, and three more, including Virgil and Milo Scarsdale, as the brothers were missing. Fourteen Rangers and a coyote girl against eight werewolves, and the Captain still stuck behind a line of horses, his trusted mount a pile of sand. Nettie spit into the dirt. Stupid Rangers. Couldn’t they give her an hour to make her plan work before the fools started running around like chickens with chopped-off heads?

  The air was thick with arrows and bullets and screams, and Nettie ached to shoot somebody and see sand spray the desert. Her ropes were no looser, despite the slickness of her blood, and none of the damn Rangers had come to save her; any who ran headed in the opposite direction as fast as he could go. Two more of the werewolves dissolved into black blots of sand, their horses standing over the piles as they blew away as if lost without their riders. Another Ranger took off and immediately fell with an arrow through the neck, and his horse ran even faster without him. Nettie turned to scan the direction Hennessy had taken, but he was nowhere to be seen. Even the Injun woman and her dark mount had disappeared from the horizon. Nettie was well and truly alone.

  Well, until a paint pony skidded to a stop, inches from her arm.

  Scorpion looked down at her, blood painting his shoulder as a bullet popped right out, his skin healing before her eyes.

  “Come,” he said, and she held up her wrists and gave an experimental tug to show him that no, she damn well couldn’t come.

  He grunted and slid bonelessly to the ground, snapping the rope with one swipe of his long, wicked knife. Nettie rolled to her knees and stood, and he tossed her leg over the pony like she was a sack of corn. And then he leaped up behind her, his body tight against hers, his man-parts pressing into her back as he settled her closer to the mare’s neck.

  “Hold the mane,” he said near her ear. “You fall off, I just pick you back up. No time to set broken bones.”

  Nett
ie barely had time to grasp a handful of mane before the pony leaped into a run. She didn’t dare look back at the circled Rangers as Scorpion steered his horse toward the mountains, hard on the heels of his remaining five men. Did that mean the Lobos were giving up on the Rangers? Or chasing someone who’d run off? Not that it mattered—she was going wherever they took her whether she liked it or not.

  Straight to hell.

  As if following her line of thoughts, Scorpion leaned forward. “For what I will do to you, I want darkness. And privacy.” His corded arm slipped around her waist. “And screams.”

  CHAPTER

  22

  The Lobos rode hard for what felt like hours but probably wasn’t. The land was rumpled and hard as it got closer to the Aspero mountains, as full of nooks and crannies as a chunk of stale bread. Under a cloudy sky as dark as ink, they skipped down arroyos, wound up tight trails, and skittered through scree as they clopped through canyons following a trail Nettie couldn’t see. Around every corner, she expected the Rangers to pop up from a clutch of mesquites, but… they never did.

  Nettie was grateful when they dropped down to a walk and disappointed when they stopped and dismounted. Well, dismounted was a kind word for the way Scorpion shoved her off his pony’s back and to the ground. She’d barely gotten to her knees when they’d finished hobbling their horses in a thicket and began climbing up into the buttes on foot. The heavily scarred feller they left guarding the horses pulled a cudgel from behind a rock and set it across his knees with grim determination and a cold smile, and Nettie didn’t envy anyone who faced the brute. Scorpion prodded her in the back with the butt of his knife and laughed when she stumbled, forcing her to walk ahead of him up the jagged path. She focused on the flabby buttocks of the feller in front of her, but he quickly hurried out of view, making it all the harder to stay upright without use of her hands as she fought past scrub bushes and mesquite trees.

  The rest of the men made it up the butte first and set up camp on a ledge that had seen use before. A blackened fire pit still held chunks of burned wood and bone, while rocks were arrayed in a sort of circle, as if folks like the Lobos had been sitting on them for centuries as they tortured innocent womenfolk. The ledge was hidden from the valley below by boulders and scrappy trees, and Nettie understood that these fellers would gladly rain arrows on anyone who dared venture up the path.

  Scorpion pushed her toward a semicircle of rocks that would’ve made a pleasant place to sleep, had she been camping here with the Rangers. But now, she saw it for what it was: a private little hole that would be impossible to escape if a big feller was blocking the opening.

  “Don’t move,” he said, shoving her down and pointing his knife at her face.

  God damn her, she just shook her head and looked down.

  For a while, the Lobos went about their business while Nettie tried not to fret and hated herself for failing. All the while, she was working at the knot that bound her wrists, but the danged thing refused to budge. Her heart leaped up when she heard footsteps scrabbling on the rocks, but she should’ve known nobody would get past that feller with the cudgel. One of the Lobos appeared on the path, half wolf and all covered in blood, carrying the corpse of a Ranger named Tim. He tossed what was left of Tim down near the fire pit and fell onto all fours before the man’s torn belly. Nettie turned away at his wolf snout’s first wet rip.

  For a few golden moments, it seemed as if the werewolves had forgotten her, thanks to the application of liquor and tender, white flesh. But how could a monster with a strong nose and a pizzle forget a girl waiting, tied up on the ground? As they laughed and ate on Tim and passed around a bottle of whisky they’d pulled from behind some rocks, the fellers each took a moment to hover near her, sniffing and grinning and crawling over her with their eyes. She huddled against the rock, knees to her chin, tied wrists held tight against her chest. It seemed like what a scared woman would do, as Nettie was a scared woman and was doing it.

  “Pretty mouth,” one man said, running a wide thumb over her trembling lips.

  “Little, like a boy,” another one grunted. “Gonna hurt.”

  “You shouldn’t have left town, honey,” said the next one, and she noticed that under his deep tan and the blood painting his face, he was white. When he grinned, his teeth flashed bits of gold.

  The fourth one just grinned and cackled like a coyote as he rubbed himself and licked Tim’s blood off his lips. That scared her the most of all.

  “Away,” Scorpion said, shoving the feller hard enough to make him stumble. Nettie almost thanked him, but then he gave her a similar grin and tossed Tim’s bloody saddle blanket at her. “You ready?”

  “I… I want to wash first,” she said.

  That just made him laugh harder.

  “We all want water in the desert, woman. Don’t mean you get it.” He had a whisky bottle in his other hand, and he drank deeply, eyes on hers.

  “Can I at least have a drink first? I’m right parched.”

  He sighed in annoyance, his eyes darting from her mouth to the ground she sat on as if she meant more than she was saying. Without a word, he yanked her up by the rope, tossed Tim’s blanket on the ground, spread it out with his foot, and shoved her back down. She fell hard on hands and knees and scuttled back and away. On his knees before her, he pushed the bottle against her lips and tipped it back, forcing her to swallow more of the smoke-hot liquor than she wanted. It blazed a trail to her belly and settled there like fire, an answering, angry heat igniting behind her eyes. The knife all but burned against her leg, and her fingers ached to wrap around the hilt.

  No wonder men drank before a fight. The fear was gone, replaced by ferocity.

  Nettie had hated Pap and Mam, hated all sorts of nice folks who’d looked at her like she was trash. But she’d never hated anything like she now hated these werewolves.

  When Scorpion pulled the bottle away, she spit the last mouthful of liquor in his face.

  “Cur-bitch!” With a howl, he dashed the whisky from his eyes and backhanded her in an explosion of pain that made her ears ring. “You been with white men too long. Forgot your manners.” Face still wet, he took a long drink and reached for her hands. “I’ll teach you better.”

  Nettie let him pull her hands to his crotch and tried not to make a face as he adjusted the leather flap across his lap. Confused and naïve as she was, the rope bindings made her clumsier still, and she made a great play at not being able to accommodate him, drawing out the time as he drank whisky and wiggled and grunted. No matter how he moved her hands, how he tried to show her what it was he wanted, she acted dumb, and he eventually reached for her face, intending to use a part of her that was thus far unencumbered.

  And the whisky’s foolhardy bravery ran dry.

  She couldn’t breathe, and everything in her rebelled and pulled away and ran hotter than the sun. It was the last straw for a girl who wanted to be a boy, who’d always feared this exact moment but had put herself here for the sake of her friends. Her friends who should’ve damn well showed up by now—at least Hennessy. Waiting for salvation had never done her a damn lick of good. So she wasn’t waiting anymore.

  Nettie looked up, checking that the other Lobos were still muzzle-deep in Tim’s belly, all wolf and hunger. Swallowing down a mouthful of whisky-tinged spittle and bile, she finally let her shaking hands do exactly what he wanted, hating herself and fate and menfolk in general. Scorpion leaned against the rock, his eyes closed and his head back. Nettie pretended she was—well, shit. There was nothing in life to compare it to. But she kept it up for a few minutes, right up until Scorpion settled further back and groaned. In one swift move, she yanked the knife out of his belt with both hands and cut off the tall, proud thing he’d been so interested in her holding.

  Scorpion screamed like he was dying and scrabbled on the ground for the damn thing, but Nettie tossed it over the ledge into the pass below. Fast as a snake, she stuck the knife between her boots and snicked it thro
ugh the rope between her wrists. Feller’s blade was so sharp it only took one hitch, and then she had her silver knife in her right hand and his bloody one in her left, crouched and waiting with her back to the boulder for whatever came at her next.

  The head Lobo was a mess of blood under his loincloth, his head gone to wolf and his hands in clawed fists covered in blood that couldn’t stop grabbing for what was now gone. Nettie was pretty sure he was going to kill her, but he was too busy watching his business seal over as if he’d never been cut, as if there’d never even been a pizzle there to begin with, just a sad little stump. For just a second, she thought of the child’s foot, and how Winifred said it never healed, and she had to figure that maybe the bone was the important part. She tried to laugh, but it came out a sob.

  The other fellers charged over at their leader’s screams and began stalking her, hackles up and teeth bared in growls, but they had wolf faces and were doing that fool thing dogs do where they attack real slow instead of just leaping. As the first one launched himself at her, a shot rang out, and the beast burst into a cloud of black sand that stung Nettie’s eyes.

  “Run, fool!” Hennessy shouted.

  More gunshots punched the sky, and Nettie scrambled over the boulder and toward the trail down off the butte. Everything went too quiet and easy for a second, and then heavy paws landed on her back, forcing her to the ground. She let loose Scorpion’s knife but not her silver one and twisted around under the claws, struggling onto her back as the werewolf snapped at her face and missed. One punch from the silver knife, and the monster writhed around and howled but didn’t turn to sand. Heart hammering and flipping like a fish, Nettie yanked out the blade and tried again and again as he snapped at the air, finally rewarded with a face full of black sand that tasted like ash in her mouth.