“Yes, everything else.” McAlpine curled his upper lip and, drawing a deep, calming breath, sagged back in his chair. “I know this isn’t the ascribed view, but why the hell not kill them all? Kill them all now before they all get away!” He threw back the last of his brandy and, fumbling with the cut-glass decanter on his desk, refilled it.
“Don’t want to make the situation any worse than it already is,” Hathaway reminded the man. He sucked on a fat stogie from the warden’s humidor, blowing a large smoke ring. “Part of me wants to agree with you, though, Lieutenant. Especially after what happened to my detail. Sooner or later, somethin’ real bad’s gonna happen because we got so damn many o’ ’em all over the West. And now we got some we didn’t even know we had.”
His heavy, rounded shoulders jerked as he chuckled fatefully, shaking his head. He was thinking, of course, about the dragon.
“Look, we can discuss politics all we want,” Zane said, blowing a lungful of cigarette smoke out the open casement window, looking out over the scorched yard that had only recently been cleared of charred, dead soldiers, “but what we really need is to haul ass out of here and try to cut Charlie’s sign.”
“It’s too late in the day, Uriah,” Angel said wearily, showing her own frustration. “We’re gonna have to hole up here for the night whether we like it or not. The sun’ll be down soon.”
Zane blew a smoke plume out the window over the darkening yard. Angel was right. It was too late in the day to start out. They and their horses needed food and a good night’s sleep.
But he had a dark feeling, whether due to his recently acquired and troubling condition or not, that something bad was going to happen, and the chance of that occurring grew by leaps and bounds with every minute Charlie Hondo and his men were running off their leashes. If he’d had hackles at that moment, they’d have been raised.
“You have somewhere we can bunk?” Angel asked the lieutenant.
“Sure, sure. We have an entire wing for visitors, if you’ll pardon the ghouls’ screams, which tend to pick up after midnight but begin to fade slightly after three.” McAlpine blinked slowly. “I’ll send someone to make sure the beds are made. You can dine with me, if you like, in the warden’s quarters. Thank heavens none of the cooks were burned to ashes. Little good they’d do if we were under siege again—most being women.”
“You’d be surprised what a woman can do with the right weapons, Lieutenant,” Angel said crisply, throwing back her brandy.
McAlpine, a pale, light-skinned man with large ears and pomaded hair, looked chagrined.
Zane took another puff of the pungent Mexican tobacco he liked so well for the peppery tang it left in his throat, and blew the smoke into the room as he said, “Does the name Elaina Baranova ring a bell with you, Lieutenant?”
McAlpine looked at him, the lines of weariness in his forehead cutting deeper. “Of course. Our resident black sorceress, one of three we have imprisoned here. We call her ‘the queen’ because she acts like one and seems to carry the respect of nobility among the other ghouls. Oh, God, why bring her up now?”
“I’d like to speak with her privately.”
Angel threw back the last of her brandy. “Why? Who is she?”
“Oh, that won’t be possible, I’m afraid, Mr. Zane. No one speaks privately with any of the prisoners here. All conversations must be overheard by second and third non-ghoul parties out of fear, of course, of spells being exchanged or imparted.” He spoke that last as though reading the words out of a regulation manual.
“All right, you can join us. But I would like to speak to her.”
“Uriah…” Angel said.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“If you’re to speak with ‘the queen,’ Mr. Zane, we’ll need a third party in addition to a couple official jailers. I’ll summon them in the morning.”
Zane flicked his cigarette butt out the window. “We’re pullin’ out first thing in the morning. I’d like to speak to her now.”
Angel hiked a shoulder. “I’ll be that third party, Lieutenant. If Zane thinks it’s important to talk to the witch, I’d like to hear what she has to say.”
“You don’t want to go in there,” Zane said.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Look, look,” said McAlpine, looking pained. “I would rather do this tomorrow, Mr. Zane. My nerves are all leaping up and down my spine, and—”
“I need to talk to her tonight, Lieutenant.”
“Good God, man, why?”
“She could save us a whole lot of time and make a big difference to whether we catch up with old Charlie Hondo or not.”
They all stared at him.
Hathaway broke the silence after blowing another smoke ring. “Well, hell.” He stubbed his stogie out in an ashtray on the sofa beside him. “I reckon I’ll trail along, too. Me, I’m partial to witches myself. Had one put a hex on all three of my ex‑wives.”
Half-drunk, he grinned.
McAlpine summoned a couple of jailers armed with carbines and stone talismans draped around their necks, which some believed would ward off spells and incantations of doom founded in the darker forms of known magic.
They were a burly pair, tough-nut soldiers who’d survived the War and who obviously prided themselves on having the courage it took to guard the ghouls at Hellsgarde. They wore sweat-stained sombreros with the brims turned up in front and fastened to the crowns, cavalry-fashion. Each carried a Model ’67 Winchester carbine, and in addition to the talismans, they wore bandoliers of both brass and silver, though there were no werebeasts of any stripe in the Witches’ Wing of Hellsgarde.
Crossbows dangled from their hips. Several knives of different shapes and sizes bristled about their uniforms.
The wing was on the opposite side of the castle, and the two gravely silent guards, holding flaming torches aloft, led Lieutenant McAlpine, Zane, Angel, and Hathaway down endless stone cavern-like corridors lit with flickering torches. Their boots clacked and chinged on the cracked, heaving stones. The warden shamelessly cradled the cut-glass brandy decanter to his chest, as though it were a suckling baby, and took occasional pulls directly from the bottle.
No cells opened onto this main, circuitous artery through the bowels of the castle, but eerie sounds of all pitches emanated from the thick stone walls, almost as though the walls themselves were making them. Occasionally, Zane could feel a vibration in the floor beneath his boots.
Once, he put his hand on the wall and felt the shudder there, as well. He remembered the cave in which he and Junius Webb had found the high-brow swillers, and the hair on the back of his neck pricked. He almost wished he’d fortified himself with one more shot of whiskey. Odd, he vaguely thought, that as a ghoul himself he’d be so squeamish.
He gently closed his fist, shutting away the thought as he believed he’d closed off that dark side of himself, forever able to keep it from reaching the light of a full moon as it had but only once in the year since he’d been bitten.
When they came to intersecting corridors, they stopped in front of two broad, timbered, iron-banded doors. Overhead lay a wood sign on which WITCHES COVEN had been burned. While one of the guards fumbled with a key ring, Zane glanced to his left and saw several barred doors opening off both sides of the corridor. Cells, most likely.
What else could they be? He looked down the right corridor and saw the same thing—more doors.
Ghouls of some sort must lurk inside, though there were no sounds here but the murmurings in the rock walls and the clatter of the keys on the heavy iron ring. There was also the gurgle of liquid as Lieutenant McAlpine threw back another slug of the brandy. Chairs on either side of the door the guard was unlocking said that guards were customarily posted here, but due to the sudden lack of manpower at Hellsgarde, they were probably all out guarding the canyon to make sure no spooks got out.
Or in again.
The locking bolt clicked. The guard opened the heavy door that rocked back slowly, li
ke the door of a vault, on stout hinges. Unexpectedly, a pleasing odor, a homey odor, wafted into the dank hall from beyond the door, and as one of the guards led the company into the room beyond while the other closed and locked the door behind them, Zane was surprised to find himself in a large room outfitted much like the first floor of a cozy albeit modest house in your typical frontier town.
One in which supper was being cooked. The smell of fried liver lay thick in the pent‑up air.
There were two rooms partitioned off from each other by a crude-hewn set of stacked cupboards, a sitting area with comfortable chairs and a fainting couch to the left, and a kitchen with a cloth-covered table and a black range to the right. Two lumpy old women in shapeless dresses, heavy shoes, and aprons were cooking in the kitchen while—Zane blinked and felt his hand edge toward the butt of the Colt Navy slanting across his belly—a sleek black puma lounged on a braided rope rug before a snapping fire in a fieldstone hearth.
In front of him and the warden, the burly guard stepped back, pivoted on his hips to face the cat, and cocked his Winchester loudly.
The deputy warden made a gurgling sound in his throat and pointed at the beast sitting there as though on a sunny slope, slowly flicking its tail, yellow eyes shiny with reflected fire and lamplight. “She…G‑goddamnit! She’s not supposed to do that!”
The old woman forking beef liver around in a sputtering pan turned to see the cat, and said in a scolding tone, “Elain-ahh!”
Throaty laughter sounded a half second before the cat on the rug sort of melted, waxlike, shifting its shape to become a beautiful, blue-eyed brunette with gold hoop earrings and a high-busted, full-hipped figure in a green velvet dress trimmed in wolf fur. Lounging on the rug before the fire, her long legs curled beneath her, Elaina Baranova threw her head back and laughed her hoarse, husky laugh, showing all her white teeth glistening like porcelain between full, red-painted lips. Her blue eyes, which owned a Slavic slant in a heart-shaped face, shone like polished marble.
“Miss Baronova, you’ve been warned countless times against shape-shifting, and if this…”
“I do apologize, Lieutenant McAlpine,” Elaina said, though her exotic eyes were riveted on Zane with the zeal of a stalking huntress, “but a girl gets bored, you know. I don’t shift my shape regularly but just to get the guards’ goat.”
Her lips stretched pleasingly. “Zane.” She almost whispered it, scrutinizing him as though he, too, were a figure that might shift and be suddenly gone or merely a figment of her imagination.
“Hello, Elaina,” Zane said. “Been a while.”
Her bosom heaved behind the dress, the cleavage-baring neckline of which was fringed with wolf fur as black as the puma she’d just been. She slid her eyes from Zane to the others, her gaze lingering on Angel.
“Well, you certainly bring a crowd, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Angel said coolly, her own eyes appraising the strangely beautiful woman before her. “He does.”
Chapter 17
ELAINA BARONOVA
Elaina’s long, slanted eyes narrowed with a feline-like knowingness as she said, sliding her gaze from Angel back to Zane, “She’s jealous.”
Angel snorted. “Like hell. Uriah and I are after Charlie Hondo and the ghouls who broke him out of here. We’d just like to ask you a few questions, if—”
“Red.” Zane looked at her sharply. “Let me handle this.”
“Handle what? I certainly never expected to see you again, not after I ended up here on a handful of rumors and innuendo that spread like a wildfire around New Orleans.” Tears shone in Elaina’s eyes, and her lip trembled a little as she said, “Crowd or not, it is good to see you again, Uriah.”
McAlpine turned to Zane. “How well do you two know each other, anyway?”
“Lieutenant, let us have a minute, will you?” McAlpine began to object but Zane interrupted him with, “I know it’s against regulations. But I believe Miss Baronova has some information about the folks who busted Hondo out of here, and if we want him back in his cage, I need a moment alone with Elaina. It could be the difference.”
McAlpine slid his eyes between the pair, then drew a sharp, resigned breath. “All right, all right. It’s against regulations but I don’t hope to be here much longer, anyway. And I reckon things couldn’t really get much worse than they already are.”
He canted his head toward a curtained doorway in the middle of the back wall. “You have five minutes. No weird stuff. If she were to loose some spell she’s privy to, it wouldn’t do much good for us to have her locked up in the first place, would it?”
“Elaina?” Zane said.
“Anything you want, Uriah. Just wish we had more time.” She quirked her lips devilishly as she glanced at Angel, who regarded the witch blandly.
Elaina walked to the curtained doorway, her long, green crinoline skirts rustling softly across the floor carpeted in a deep, plush, wine-red rug without any design whatsoever, due, most likely, to the government’s fear that Elaina and the other two sorceresses might turn one into a talisman of sorts.
Zane followed the Russian witch through the curtain and found himself in a room not nearly as well outfitted as the two he’d just left. In fact, it was a jail cage with two large cots in it, all appointed with heavy skins and furs. There were only two windows, hardly larger than rifle slots, high up in the walls.
The curtain had just barely fallen back into place before Elaina spun around, hair and skirts flying, and flung her arms around Zane’s neck, pressing her soft lips to his. At first, he resisted. But even with Angel in the next room, he couldn’t resist an embrace from his old lover Elaina Baronova, witch that she had turned out to be. A deadly witch, he well knew. But one who he hoped was still in love with him.
They’d met when Zane had taken a riverboat to New Orleans hunting Cajun ghouls and ended up spending the long, rainy winter there.
As he mashed his own lips against hers, feeling her suck at him gently, her saliva warm and tasting as he remembered it had when they were about five years younger and holing up in one of the brothels owned by Elaina’s father, himself a medium, who had built a nice stake before the War operating a circus and traveling carnival show throughout Louisiana and Texas that specialized in fortune-telling.
She pulled her head back slightly, then rubbed her nose against his. “Did you come to spring your witch, Uriah Zane?”
“I came to ask for your help.”
Vaguely, he was wondering if she’d noted the change in him, but nothing registered in her eyes, and he thought that a good thing. Maybe he’d suppressed it so far that not even a witch of Elaina’s caliber could detect it.
“Anything for you, Uriah.” She leaned into him, pressing her breasts lightly against his chest and resting her wrists on his shoulders. “You know that. You tried to save me once, made a genuine effort to make an honest witch out of me, and I was too pigheaded to listen. Thus, I am fated to remain here with those two old crones whose powers can’t hold a candle to mine, for the rest of my life.”
She brushed her lips once more across his. “Or until you rescue me.”
Zane placed his hands on her wrists, gave them an affectionate squeeze. She was as wicked as they came. She’d wielded her powers with aplomb in New Orleans, gaining power over her father’s competitors and even casting a spell to turn one into a spider, which she then crushed beneath her shoe. So she’d been incarcerated here in Hellsgarde, a prison reserved for only those most diabolical of witches who, unable to resist their own powers, had proved beyond rehabilitation. She’d have been hanged if there’d been a judge brave enough to pass sentence on her.
Still, Zane felt a pull toward her. Before he’d known what she was, they’d had a wonderful couple of rainy months in each other’s arms.
Knowing he didn’t have much time, he leaped to the point of his visit. “Who helped those three wolves rescue Charlie Hondo, Elaina? Who’s the dragon-speaker?”
“Something tells
me you already know the answer to that question, Uriah.”
“Ravenna?”
“That’s right.” Admiration shone like guttering candles in Elaina’s long eyes. “The god Elyhann has taught her very well. Makes me jealous.”
“Oh, you didn’t do too bad.”
She stepped back and crossed her arms on her breasts. “Dragon conjuring. Even I have to admire such gall. Elyhann never cast such spells my way, and that truly does gravel me, Uriah. Oh, the fun I could have had!”
“Maybe you didn’t ask.”
“I shouldn’t have had to ask. Ravenna… I have to admit that her harsh upbringing in Mexico, where witches are tolerated even less than here, made her riper pickings for Elyhann. Whatever the reason, if you’re going after Charlie Hondo, Uriah, tread carefully. Ravenna has used the black powers of the meanest demon in Hell to her best advantage. There will be more tricks up her sleeve besides dragons.”
“Why? Why would Ravenna help the Hell’s Angels?”
“Charlie Hondo, you know, is a rakish ole devil. There’s just something about a man who gets a nasty need for a shave every full moon. But Ravenna is a girl of opportunity, if she’s anything, so I doubt it’s merely sex or love. I really couldn’t tell you, Uriah. But if he threw in with Ravenna to get him out of Hellsgarde, I’d bet my papa’s last whorehouse that their partnership goes beyond the prison break. They’ve partnered up for a good, dark reason. She needs Charlie, and he needs her.”
She dug her fingers into her arms. “It give me the shivers just thinking about it. So much power in a vessel even less restrained than myself.”
“You know that Charlie and his pards turned several hours before the full moon rose, don’t you?”
Elaina winked. “Like I said, Ravenna has some mighty powers, Uriah. Takes quite a woman to haze a dragon around the skies and to allow shapeshifters to shift at will. I’m betting that her powers are a little sapped, however. If you’re going to catch up to them, it had better be soon, before she has time to replenish herself. No witch in human form, not even Ravenna, can stay strong forever.”
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