Dust of the Damned (9781101554005)

by Brandvold, Peter

  The air left the ghoul hunter’s lungs in one massive grunt. He blinked rapidly.

  As his vision cleared, he saw the dragon sort of twist and pivot in the air. Unsteadily? Hard to tell. Now it banked sharply left, heading toward the tall northern ridge mantled far above the beast with the sandstone caprock. The dragon continued to bank, still rising and then gradually dropping as it turned away from the ridge and careened toward the limestone knob where Zane figured Angel and Jesse were hunkered.

  Apparently, the beast was going to make another try for Zane.

  The ghoul hunter, buoyed by the possibility he’d done some damage to the winged ghoul and wanting to give it another shot, shouldered the battered gun and heaved himself back up the rocks to the slanted, scorched boulder at the crag’s top. The rock beneath his moccasin souls was hot. He could feel the heat through his buckskins as he knelt and spread the tripod’s legs once more.

  He turned the canister toward the west, where the winged beast was just now banking against the lower edge of the northern ridge’s caprock and sinking back down toward the canyon.

  “Come on, you devil,” Zane said. “Let’s do‑si‑do around the old oak tree one more time! Whaddaya say!”

  The dragon dropped down over an edge of the limestone knob. As it dropped lower, one wing brushing the side of a stone parapet, a slender figure appeared suddenly atop that same rock formation. Just as suddenly, the figure kicked out away from the rock, scissoring its legs, its hat tumbling down its back, and leaped onto the dragon’s back and dropped belly down against the scaly hide.

  The sun flashed off bloodred hair streaming out in the wind.

  Zane lifted his head from the Gatling’s canister and blinked, awestruck. “Crazy bitch!”

  As the dragon angled toward Zane, the winged beast tipped to one side and then the other, its golden eyes not looking as bright as before. If a dragon could look confused, this one looked that way, as if detecting a weight on its back but unable to comprehend what it was or where it had come from. The dragon, in its confusion, tipped northward and slightly off Zane’s course. As it did, the ghoul hunter watched in horror as the redhead atop the beast’s back climbed up behind the massive, green head.

  “Angel, for Christ’s sakes,” Zane shouted, lunging to his feet and cupping his hands around his mouth. “Get down from there, you cork-headed fool!”

  Balancing on her knees, red hair streaming out in the wind, Angel unsheathed her long, silver Spanish sword from the scabbard hanging down her right, leather-clad leg, just behind one of her holstered six-guns. The beast was still angling slightly away from Zane, between him and the northern cliff wall.

  As it came within fifty yards, he watched, lower jaw hanging, as Angel rose up on her knees and raised the down-angled sword in both her gloved hands. She and the dragon were so close to him now, the dragon suddenly seeming oblivious to him, that he saw Angel’s green eyes open wide in determination and her fine jaws draw taut as she thrust downward with both hands.

  The sword plunged into a ring of what appeared relatively soft tissue between the beast’s head and neck. Angel threw herself down and forward, heaving with all her weight on the handle and burying the blade nearly hilt deep. As she did, and as she and the winged beast flew past Zane, whom the strong wind of the massive wings blew back on his butt, the dragon threw his head back and grimaced and loosed a high-pitched, snarling wail that bounced like thunder off the near rims.

  Beneath the wail and the rush of the wind, Zane could hear Angel screaming, “Die, you son of a bitch! Die!”

  Her scream as well as the dragon’s wail dwindled as the beast flew off to Zane’s right and pitched steeply groundward. For a few seconds, it looked as though the dragon would plunge headfirst into the canyon bottom.

  Zane’s heart was like a turnip in his throat.

  The beast tipped slightly to one side of a low pile of boulders from which several cedars grew, then gave another defiant wail and, with a violent thrash of his tail, righted himself and hammered the air with his wings.

  He gained altitude. Because of the distance and the shadows on that side of the canyon, Zane could no longer see Angel as the dragon climbed, launching himself north toward the steep ridge looming there. High and higher he climbed, growing smaller and smaller against the runneled and crenellated side of the sandstone cliff pocked here and there with talus slides.

  Gradually, he closed on the cliff, rising toward the bulging sandstone cap.

  That he wasn’t going to make it became clear as Zane saw the ridge fairly swallow the giant beast a half second before the dragon crashed headlong into the sheer rock wall. Where the giant’s body once had been, now a great burst of orange flames roiled outward from the cliff, consuming the still-flicking, green-and-yellow tail.

  A second after the beast had smashed into the cliff, the thunder of what sounded like a barrel of dynamite detonating reached the ghoul hunter’s ears. At the same time, through the roiling flames bursting outward and down from the side of the cliff, Zane saw bits and pieces of the body, including its wings, free-falling toward the canyon bottom. He couldn’t help watching for a slender figure clad in leather and with long, red hair….

  As the torn hulk of the dead beast continued falling and burning and smoking, Zane left the Gatling gun where it was and, wheeling, began climbing, half leaping and half falling down the side of the escarpment. He was halfway down when he saw Hathaway standing on a ledge of rock and leaning outward to stare toward the north cliff face. The scout looked at Zane, his eyes and mouth big as he said, “What the hell happened?”

  “Fool girl killed herself,” was all Zane could say, breathless, as he continued dropping down the escarpment, skipping from one boulder to another.

  Ten feet from the ground, he leaped the rest of the way, landing flat-footed, spreading his arms for balance, and took off running around the side of the scarp, lifting his knees and arms high, moccasins crunching brush and gravel and pummeling sage and low cedars. He didn’t know where he was running exactly—generally, toward the dragon, but as he ran he turned his head this way and that, hoping to find Angel alive somewhere among the rocks and brush littering the canyon floor.

  But the brunt of his attention was fixed upslope, where the great burning hulk of the dragon was just now tumbling in pieces both large and small to the base of the cliff face, burning among the strewn boulders. He ran hard, mindless of his aching lungs and burning chest. A big chunk of the dragon teetered at the base of the cliff, then tumbled toward him, and as it burned and rolled awkwardly down the slope, he could see that it was one of the demon’s wings. Rolling and burning behind the wing was the tip of the tail.

  He ran to his right, avoiding the burning appendages by several yards. The scorching heat of the burning carcass growing intensely before him, like that of a vast blacksmith’s forge, and knowing he could go no farther without being burned himself, he stopped suddenly, fifty yards from the cliff. He leaned forward, hands to his thighs, wheezing as he sucked breaths into his aching lungs and stared in horror at the several leaping fires.

  “Red,” he said, managing only a raking whisper. “For Christ’s sake, Red, why in the hell’d you make such a dunderheaded play?”

  Brush crackled behind him. He froze, staring straight ahead, pricking his ears.

  “Damn,” a familiar voice said among the crackling weeds and crunching gravel. “Anyone got a drink? This dragon-slayin’ is a mite hard on a girl.”

  Zane wheeled, wide-eyed.

  Angel stood about thirty yards downslope from him, her hair a dusty, weed- and seed-flecked mess about her bare shoulders. Her leather vest was twisted low and to one side, causing one large breast to bulge up farther than the other. Generally, she was dirty and disheveled, and her scarred face was scraped and bruised, as were her long, bare arms, the knees of her leather pants torn. But she was all in one piece.

  And she was alive.

  With a great burst of raw energy mixed with
overwhelming emotion, Zane cursed and ran down the slope to her. He wrapped his big arms around her in a savage bear hug, lifted her two feet off the ground, and swung her in a complete circle before setting her back down. “Goddamn, you crazy redhead, I thought for sure you’d bought the ranch and the whole damn remuda!”

  He wrapped his arms around her neck and planted a hard kiss on her cheek. He placed his hands on her shoulders and held her away from him, looking her up and down to make sure she was all right.

  “How in the hell did you make it out of that? You a cat or somethin’?”

  Pale and exhausted, Angel blew a strand of hair out of her face and hooked a thumb over her right shoulder. “I sorta rolled off the side of that critter when I figured it was about to crash. Skidded down a few of the trees sticking out from that scarp yonder, and landed in a patch of buckbrush.”

  She wrinkled her nose and looked up the slope toward where the dragon continued to burn. “Contrary to the fairy tales we all read as sprouts, those dragons are repugnant damn critters. Close up, they smell like rotten fish.”

  She spat in disgust and ran the back of a gloved hand across her mouth.

  Zane wrapped an arm around her shoulders from behind, and turned her around. Hathaway was leading both General Lee and his mule toward Angel and the ghoul hunter. From across the canyon, Jesse James was galloping atop his buckskin while leading Angel’s paint, pumping a fist in the air and howling madly.

  “Come on,” Zane said. “I’ll buy ya a drink.”

  “I could use one.”

  They walked several yards along the canyon bottom.

  “Look at that,” Angel said, glancing at the sky over the southern ridge. “Damn near a full moon.”

  Zane looked at the big, pale orb, large as a watch face in the sky fading toward a dusky gray green, and nearly full except for a loss of definition along its lower left side. Like the edge of an old, worn nickel. In twenty-four hours, that blurred edge would be clearly defined.

  “Well, look at that,” Zane said, dropping his arm away from the redhead’s shoulder. “I do believe you’re right, Red.”

  Chapter 30

  FULL MOON RISING

  Hathaway’s resonant voice was close in Zane’s ear. “Dawn, Uriah. Rise and shine.”

  Zane opened his eyes as the scout went over and crouched beside Angel’s still form on the other side of the campfire that was a low mound of umber coals. The ghoul hunter perused the sky touched with periwinkle blue between the jutting, black velvet peaks in the east. No sign of the moon, of course.

  That damn moon.

  He shook the thought from his mind. He’d beaten the wolf. The only reason he felt it stirring inside him again was because he’d started doubting himself after being so repulsed by the Hell’s Angels. He’d beaten it back for nearly a year, and he’d even almost stopped thinking about it. He couldn’t think about it today, either. He had plenty of other problems on his mind, the biggest being the need to run down the Hell’s Angels and their Mexican witch guide before they accomplished whatever hellish task they intended here in the Lobo Negros.

  What Elaina Baranova had told Zane made him think that the stakes were higher than he could ever imagine….

  He yawned, sat up, ran his hands back through his tangled mane of black hair, and looked around at the horses picketed nearby. Zane’s party had set up camp near the scarp from which the ghoul hunter had fired on the dragon, as it had been too late to continue their trek. Besides, Angel needed rest after her ordeal, which she’d worn well despite her scrapes and bruises.

  To his right, Hathaway crouched over the figure of Jesse James lying curled on his side, head resting on the elbow bent beneath him, softly snoring beneath his two wool Army blankets. Cautiously, Hathaway clamped a foot down on the gun and holster lying near Jesse, then nudged the Missourian’s shoulder with the butt of his Winchester.

  As expected, the outlaw jerked with a start, throwing one hand out toward the six-shooter jutting from the holster around which the cartridge belt was coiled. His hand grabbed the top of Hathaway’s low-heeled cavalry boot. He froze, looked up slowly, a little chagrined, to see the dark face peering down at him.

  Jesse smiled sheepishly.

  “That’s the lurch of a wanted man,” Angel observed as she knelt, rolling up her blankets. “Don’t worry, James—you won’t be wanted much longer.”

  “Oh, I’ll always be wanted, Marshal. By good-lookin’ women, ’specially. Always have been.”

  “You flatter yourself.”

  “Someone has to.” Jesse yawned and stretched.

  Zane rolled his own blankets quickly and tied the roll closed with rawhide straps he’d sewn into the wool. He glanced at Jesse, who’d crawled toward the fire with his empty cup and used a leather swatch to lift the coffeepot from a flat rock in the coals and shake it.

  “Well, you got us to the Lobo Negros, Jesse,” Zane said with reluctant gratitude. “You got some vision about where we trail from here?”

  Jesse poured the scorched, smoking brew into his tin cup, then sat back on his butt, looking over the cup’s rim toward the northern ridge where the dead dragon had finally stopped smoldering though the rotten-fish stench remained. “Hell, I ain’t no witch. Now, my granny could lead you right to where the Hell’s Angels are right now. Me—I didn’t get that much of the gift. I just seen the wolf’s head cappin’ that peak there.” He lifted his chin to inspect the ridge towering over them, capped in weathered sandstone.

  Zane followed Jesse’s gaze. “I don’t see the head.”

  “It’s back farther. Can’t see it from this angle. Juts up from the other side of this here ridge, forms a ridge all its own. I been keepin’ a watch on it as we approached the range.”

  Jesse blew on his coffee, sipped, and shook his head. “Them killers is gonna rue the day they killed my brother, Frank… Cole… all the others.” Tears of rage and grief glistened in

  the outlaw’s pale eyes. “Them’s all the family I have except a few stashed here and there in the hills back home—all beaten an’ broken by the massacre o’ Lincoln’s”—he gritted his teeth—“mercenaries.”

  “Well, you’ll get your chance at what’s left of those mercenaries,” Zane said, donning his hat and adding a few chunks of piñon to the fire. “Just don’t forget who your enemies are. Might cause me to make the same mistake.”

  “I scouted north last night, before good dark.” Hathaway had emptied the coffeepot and was adding fresh water from his canteen. “Found a coupla piles of horse apples them spooks didn’t bother to hide.”

  “Probably figured the dragon would keep their backtrail clear of shadowers,” Angel said, tossing a pouch of Arbuckles’ to the scout, who caught it against his chest.

  “I ’spect we won’t have much trouble followin’ ’em. From what I seen, just north of here there ain’t too many trail options. Rough country, all up and down, steep ridges of sandstone and granite. Not much water, neither. Just a few trails between narrow canyons. Devil’s playground kind of place.”

  “Well, hell,” Zane said, grabbing his rifle and blanket roll and walking toward their picketed mounts. “No reason to burn daylight here, then.”

  “There ain’t much daylight to speak of, Uriah.” Angel sat back against her saddle, watching him.

  Zane glanced toward the lilac sky showing between black ridges in the east, then continued striding toward the horses, casting a look in the direction the full moon would rise. “There’s enough.”

  Behind him, Hathaway glanced at Angel and shrugged. As he began pouring the coffee water back into his canteen, he sighed. “I reckon we can brew a pot later, when we stop to rest the hosses.”

  “What’s his hurry?” Jesse wanted to know as he sipped the last of the brewed coffee without chagrin, glancing over his shoulder as Zane walked away. “Might have poor luck, trailin’ in the dark.”

  Angel kicked dirt on the fire, then lifted one of her six-guns from its holster. “I reckon U
riah’s got it right,” she said, also casting an uneasy glance toward where the full moon would rise. “There’ll be light enough soon.” She rolled the cylinder across her forearm, imagining each of the silver slugs nestled in their chambers, then sheathed the piece, grabbed her rifle, saddlebags, and bedroll, and strode off toward the horses.

  Only a few hours ahead rode the Hell’s Angels and Ravenna Gonzalez-Vara. At midmorning, riding along a narrow, crooked, steep-walled canyon, Ravenna glanced at the sky.

  “Chico, where are you, damnit?” She noted the wary tone in her voice and didn’t like it.

  Riding to her left, the other three riding single-file behind, Charlie said, “What’s the matter, chiquita?”

  “Chico. I haven’t seen him since just after I managed to conjure him again finally. And I had a dark dream last night.”

  “About the dragon?”

  “Sí. I think so. I don’t like it that he’s not near.”

  “Thought he was supposed to be out interceptin’ folks who might be shadowin’ us.”

  “Sí, sí. But I should see him. I conjured him. I can call him back when I have the power. I have the power now, and I called him back this morning, after my dream. To reassure myself that…”

  The horses’ shod hooves clacked on the stony canyon floor. A hawk sat on a small thumb of rock protruding from the two-thousand-foot cliff on the right side of the canyon, the raptor’s head turning slowly, tracking the four men and the black-haired woman walking their horses along the rocky trail partly shaded by the eastern ridge blocking the climbing sun.