Wake of Vultures

by Lila Bowen

  A wolf squeal and another puff of sand told her one more Lobo was gone, somewhere in the camp. A feller who wasn’t Sam whooped, while another feller screamed. Nettie scraped black sand off her mouth and tried to understand what was happening around the fire. Keeping her head low, she peeked out from the jumble of boulders. One wolf was muzzle down in a feller named Blackmoore, who was still mostly alive and dancing around. Nettie reached for where her gun should’ve been, wishing to hell she had a way to kill one of them damn dogs without getting close enough to smell Tim’s blood on its breath. At the very least, Blackmoore deserved an end to his suffering.

  “Rhett?”

  Sam had her pistol in hand, a few yards off and crouched, spinning in place as he waited for the next attack. But something told Nettie not to answer him. Scorpion was still on the loose, so far as she knew, and the feller had more reason than most to want her dead.

  A twig cracked to her left. She pivoted, knife out.

  A flash of yellow eyes in the dark made her stomach tighten and writhe. The stalking wolf was big and bloody and had a lot more revenge in its eyes than any wolf had a right to possess.

  Nettie swallowed hard, the knife slippery in her hand.

  “What’s wrong, Scorpion? Did I not learn my manners?” she spit.

  In response, he growled, long and low.

  “I could try again. Just let me run back down the trail and find your little pizzle.”

  She wanted to glance over her shoulder and see if Sam had heard her goading the monster, but she knew better than to turn away from an angry dog. Edging back, she fetched up against the boulder, her boots tangled in Tim’s blanket. There was no sound in the world but the wolf’s growl, no smell but the hot meat breath hissing between huge teeth as it cornered her.

  If she died here, would she join the Injun woman?

  Hell no. Nettie had no interest in riding double on a wet black mare.

  “Come on, monster. Take what you want. If you can.”

  As if he’d been waiting for her permission, the wolf that was Scorpion leaped, and Nettie jabbed for him with her knife. It sunk in, but the creature’s heart must’ve been smaller than she’d guessed, as the goddamn thing didn’t have the good sense to bust into sand. Her fist pressed into a wet spot in his furry chest, her boots fighting for purchase against his blood-soaked belly as she tried her damnedest to keep his teeth from scoring her flesh.

  “You need to end this yourself?” Sam asked, but Nettie was fighting too hard to hunt around for him. All she saw was wolf.

  “Hell no, Sam! Just shoot him!”

  A gun went off, way too close, and the werewolf’s nose exploded in a cloud of foul meat. Nettie spit and rolled away as it clawed at its face, and Sam shot again, this time sending Scorpion to black dust that blew away on the desert night, leaving behind a set of fangs, a silver knife, and a bloodied scrap of leather.

  Sam was in her face in a heartbeat, firm hands on her shoulder. “Are you hurt? Are you bit?”

  Nettie shrank from his touch, still rattled. “Just deaf from your goddamn gun,” she muttered.

  Acting fussy as an old woman, Sam dusted hands over her hair as if checking for head wounds she hadn’t noticed. Another Ranger wandered up, speckled with blood and fur and looking rattled as he rubbed his arm.

  “Last one’s gone, I guess,” he said.

  Sam looked him up and down with the same sharp concern. “Are you bit?”

  The feller shrugged and showed a gory wound on his arm. “Just a little tooth scrape. Didn’t take a big chunk or nothing.”

  “How long you been riding with the Rangers, Ty?”

  “Couple of months.” Ty shifted like he’d been eating too many hard beans. “Fights still take me funny, I guess.”

  A cloud shifted, letting the moon shine down. As Nettie stared at Ty, she could see the wiry gray hairs poke out where his whiskers should’ve been, altogether more slowly than it had taken the Lobos to transform. Ty scratched and shrugged his shoulders, licking his lips as his teeth started to extend.

  “What do we do?” Nettie whispered.

  Sam sniffled and dashed at his face. “Same thing a Ranger always does, what a Ranger’s sworn to do. We kill what needs to die.”

  And as Ty stared down, perplexed at the black claws growing out of his nibbled fingertips, Sam shot him right in the chest. A puff of gray sand fell with the boy’s clothes, hat, and gun belt, and Nettie shook with a sob.

  It was just too much to bear.

  Since that first night in the barn, too many people had died in front of her, good men killed by or turned into monsters, monsters turned into sand. As long as she’d dreamed of life off Pap’s farm, life among strong men and fast horses, she’d never known how much blood got spilled beyond the badly kept fence. Maybe there was good reason to seek a lazy life, after all.

  “Rhett? You’re shaking.”

  Nettie snatched up Ty’s sandy hat and smashed it onto her head and down over her face before standing to button her shirt, ignoring how her hands were indeed twitching like a mare vexed with flies.

  “Well, it’s cold. And I ain’t had food in forever. I need your saddlebags, Sam. I need my things. I need…” She ended in a sob.

  Hennessy held out the bottle of whisky, then thought better and pulled it back to wipe the blood on the lip off on his pants. Nettie took it and drank, her eyes not leaving his. This is how she figured Monty would’ve dealt with such a night: Do what needs to be done, wipe off the blood, and drink until the pain burned away for a while. Hennessy nodded once and disappeared in the dark. For a moment there, on top of the butte, Nettie felt like maybe she was the only person left in the whole world, and damned if it wasn’t lonesome, as if they’d named her that on purpose, so long ago, when she was just a little thing dreaming of saddles and reckoning Pap was the worst monster in the world.

  How wrong she’d been.

  Looking over the camp, she saw a puzzle of black and orange, desert sand and black sand mixing with blood and bodies that had been cracked open and left gaping. The whisky came back up in a rush, and she fell to her knees behind the rock as wave after wave of fire gushed out. Her gut felt like it had been scooped raw with a spoon, and she was so desperate to dull it that she stood and drank another gulp of whisky, swishing it around her mouth first.

  When she heard the scrabble of footsteps on rock, she froze. Casting around, she found the silver knife and picked it back up. Her hand knew the hilt well, and she moved into the shadow and waited. Had Hennessy had the good sense to kill the scout with the cudgel, down below? And would she ever feel safe again?

  The sound that followed was so peculiar and foreign that for a moment, she didn’t place it.

  Oh.

  It was laughter.

  A hand slapped on a back, men talking easy as they walked in boots, spurs jingling. The Captain’s voice was a bellow in the silent night, Sam’s answering, mellow tones a blessing. But still Nettie stayed in her shadowy crevice. Men and monsters, monsters and men. Once you’d seen ’em both in the same pair of eyes, it was awful hard to step out into the light again.

  “Rhett?” The thump-clank of a saddlebag hitting the ground spurred her out of playing at being prey. If she wanted to be a man again, she’d damn well better act like one.

  “Here,” she hollered, voice gruff.

  Footsteps hunted her, and she waved one hand, the one with the knife. The saddlebags clanked again, this time at her feet. She pulled the hard leather into her hidey-hole and turned her back on the men and the fire they were rekindling before unbuttoning her shirt and rewrapping her chest. By the time she’d tidied herself up and pulled Ty’s hat lower, the fellers had a good bonfire going, and Delgado was trying to make yesterday’s beans edible with strips of meat that smelled far too similar to human flesh.

  Nettie’s stomach turned. Whisky was the devil.

  “You coming out, Rhett?” the Captain called.

  Nettie hefted the saddlebags over
her shoulder and put on the sort of grim grin she reckoned a hero should wear after fighting a pack of werewolves.

  “Reportin’ for duty,” she said.

  The camp was entirely different from when the Lobos had claimed it. The fire was big and cracking, the rocks around it covered by tired Rangers sharing water skins. Jiddy had biscuits dug down among the cherry hot logs, and one of the younger fellers had found another half-full bottle of whisky and was passing it around. The splotches of red had been cleaned off the bottle’s green glass, but the sight of the damn thing made Nettie near to yarking again. The spot where Tim’s body had lain showed black and tan sand mixed and piled over a bloodstain. Far off, another fire sent white smoke into the sky, and Nettie watched it curl up, hoping wherever Tim and Moran and the other fellers had gone on to, there weren’t any werewolves in the afterlife. When a pair of vultures took to circling over the smoke, she had to look away.

  “Hennessy here says you took down half the Lobos on your lone,” the Captain said, looking her up and down.

  Nettie shook her head, fighting the flush creeping up her neck. “I took down a couple, Captain, but if Hennessy and Ty hadn’t showed up with pistols, I’d be howling at the moon, close as I can reckon.”

  “Where is Ty?”

  “Bit,” Sam mumbled.

  The Captain swept off his hat and held it to his chest. “Goddammit. Ty was coming along right fine. We lost five men tonight. But it could’ve been worse.” Smashing his hat back over his gray hair, he narrowed his eyes at Nettie, then at Sam. “What happened to the woman?”

  Sam was just about to open his fool mouth when Nettie jumped in and said the craziest thing she could think of: the truth.

  “There weren’t no woman, Captain. I just covered up and acted like a fool. Sam wouldn’t send a woman into a werewolf camp.”

  The Captain tugged at his mustache, his eyes dead as stone as he looked her up and down. “Them werewolves must’ve been blind and dumb then, son. I can’t believe you boys got away with it.”

  “Rhett’s a damn brave feller.” Sam’s voice was strained, but the truth could do that just as easily as a lie.

  With a solemn nod at Nettie, the Captain turned his measuring gaze on Sam. “By my reckon, you took down at least four Lobo wolves tonight, Hennessy.” Sam nodded once, his jaw wound tighter than a watch. Reaching into his pocket, the Captain pinned a shiny badge to Sam’s collar. “It’s about damn time. You did good, Ranger.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  The older man took a step back, pulled a rolled cigarette from behind his ear, and stuck it on his lip. “We kill what needs to die, boys. Don’t mean we like it. Get some sleep, if you can. We’ll have a service for the lost boys in the morning.”

  “Then what, Captain?” Nettie asked.

  A high whinny carried on the wind, wavering like it was underwater. The Captain shook his head and stuck a finger in his white-haired ear.

  “You know what, son. We keep on after the Cannibal Owl, fast as the horses can carry us. We do what needs to be done.”

  With a nod, the Captain moseyed to the fire and squatted to light his smoke. Sam’s eyes met Nettie’s, and he seemed a foot taller and a good deal harder, now that he had his badge.

  “Congratulations, Hennessy.”

  Sam held up his collar to admire the flash of firelight on brass, his mouth twisted up funny.

  “Thanks. I guess. Speaking of which…” Sam made as if to shake her hand, and she felt cool metal in her palm. Her badge. She gave him a nod of respect and pinned it back on.

  “Where you bedding down, Rhett?”

  Nettie scouted around the camp and jerked a thumb at an empty place near the fire and away from Tim’s blood and Scorpion’s pile of sand.

  Without a word, Sam laid out his bedroll just beside the spot she’d indicated and went to fetch his saddle. Nettie dragged Tim’s saddle blanket over and curled up beside Sam’s blanket but not too close. He was gone for a while, so long that she began to worry and imagine him ripped apart by wolves, and she wondered if she would ever relax again, now that she cared about somebody. But eventually, as he always seemed to, Sam showed up smiling, dropped her saddle and blanket on the ground, and muttered, “Your dang mare misses you something awful.”

  Nettie’s heart wrenched so hard she could only look away and nod. She tossed Tim’s blanket on the fire and settled down with her own kit, glad to breathe in Ragdoll’s good, sweet scent. “They killed your black pony, Sam.”

  “Could’ve been worse. He was a good feller, though, and I’ll miss him.”

  It was as close as they could come to apologies.

  When he handed her a bowl of beans and a biscuit, she shoveled it into her mouth as if filling in a hole, right up until her spoon scraped on tin, then quickly lay on her back, hoping it would all stay down where it belonged. Long after Sam was asleep with his hand on his new badge and his hat over his eyes, Nettie watched the stars and listened for the far-off whinny of a wet black mare. Soon the Rangers were nothing but snores and farts as Delgado slunk around the campfire, fetching the bowls and scouring out what was left with sand.

  “I know what you are.”

  Nettie jerked up at the hissed whisper, but Delgado was focused on his bowls, mouth closed and frowning. Surely the cook hadn’t spoken to her? Surely he didn’t know? She watched him for a minute, and when he looked up, held his gaze.

  “You say somethin’, Delgado?”

  He only shook his head.

  Which figured, as somebody had told her, long ago, that the feller was missing his tongue.

  Soon the fire was just a smudge, and Delgado was gone, and Nettie couldn’t keep her tired, sand-burned eyes open for another damn minute. When she fell asleep, she imagined forever being the scared woman she’d been for just a few hours, her hands tied and her head bent. She rode pillion behind the Injun woman on the wet black mare, leading the Rangers to vengeance with her tongue cut out.

  The next morning, she looked around the waking camp and realized that something was deeply wrong. Someone was missing, and Nettie hadn’t seen the familiar and annoying figure since Sam had pulled away to check his horse’s hooves for stones, long before the werewolves had attacked.

  Winifred was gone.

  CHAPTER

  23

  Winifred was gone, and no one seemed to notice. Or care.

  Nettie sat up, her head stuffy and her belly aching. Hennessy had already tidied up his bedroll and gone off to do whatever fellers did in the morning. He’d left her some jerky and a biscuit, and at first, she was angry as a one-eyed mule that he thought she needed his protection and help just because she was a girl. Then she bit off a hunk of the jerky and felt her mouth pool up with spit and realized how hungry she’d been.

  Maybe he would’ve left breakfast for a boy.

  Maybe she wouldn’t punch him again. Today.

  But now she wasn’t sure who to ask about Winifred. She didn’t see Jiddy or the Captain or any of the Rangers she knew by name and could approach without being too skittish. And after last night, she was still mighty skittish of men.

  One of the fellers had coffee boiling in a pot, and the smell was highly seductive. Pap had had coffee, now and then, whenever he’d managed to fleece some fool into paying too much for a nag Nettie had gentled. Mam had always done it up thick with a few squirts of fresh cow’s milk, and when it was gone, Nettie had had a fondness for sticking her nose in the cup and swishing the dark brown grains around her mouth. If it was that rare, it had to be pretty good, she reckoned. So she didn’t so much like it as admire it, and the smell made her mightily crave as much as she could swallow down.

  After packing up her things, she shuffled over to the feller with the coffee and stood a polite distance away.

  “You want a cup?” he asked.

  “How much?”

  The feller snorted and handed her a dented tin cup with blue speckles. “You’re a Ranger now, Rhett. Ain’t nobody gonn
a charge you for trail food.”

  Nettie gave him a nod and accepted the mug.

  “That’s mighty fine,” she said after an appreciate slurp. The man grunted and poked some eggs, but at least he wasn’t looking at her, which made her feel a bit bolder. “Say, you know what happened to Winifred?”

  The feller looked up, squinted, and scratched his parts. “Is that one of the horses?”

  Nettie hid her sneer behind her cup. “Never mind. Many thanks for the coffee.”

  Winifred, a horse?

  These fellers really didn’t see the coyote girl at all, did they?

  Nettie was still mighty tempted to goad the man, so she went a little ways away to enjoy the coffee on her own terms before she said something foolish that meant she’d never get to drink it again. The Ranger feller made it different from Pap and Mam, and there wasn’t any cow’s milk for it, nor even any cows nearby. It tasted a bit like ashes and dirt, but the warmth set up camp on top of the jerky and biscuits in her stomach in a right friendlier way than the whisky had. At least she hadn’t kept enough of the damn firewater down to make her sick this morning.

  Considering she wasn’t about to ask another stranger about the coyote-girl, she might as well take her goddamn time enjoying life for five minutes, at least until the Captain or Sam showed up. Nettie found a convenient rock and pulled her knees up to enjoy the sun rising on the prairie. Far below, half hid by mesquite, the Rangers’ horses milled with the siren’s horses and a couple of Lobo paints in friendly competition for a little grain. Nettie hoped to see Winifred there, among the creatures who wouldn’t judge her, but all she saw was Sam. The boy walked among the horses with fond pats and gentle admonitions. He’d always been good with horses. Nettie couldn’t help smiling. Things would be different between them—hell, how could it be the same, after all they’d been through? But whatever they’d be from here on out, at least one person knew her secret and would still run into a camp of angry werewolves to save her skin.