The satanic glow of her eyes lit up the coach now, the lower jaw stretching down to render her words nearly incomprehensible. “You never knew my heart.”
Shut up! a voice in his mind cried out. Shut up before she kills you!
But the words kept coming, everything he’d wanted to say but had never known how. “Your heart’s cold, Angela. It’s shot through with selfishness. No marriage can work when one doesn’t care a whit about the other.”
The coach shuddered to a halt. Angela stood over him now, her sex less than a foot from his face. But any thoughts of copulating with his once-wife had scattered like windblown dust. Her body remained largely unchanged, but from the shoulders up she had become something abhorrent, the stuff of nightmares. Cody could scarcely meet her gaze, but that was apparently what she was waiting for.
She said something else, but he couldn’t make it out. Voices sounded from outside the coach. Price and perhaps Horton.
Open the door, Cody thought. Let me out of this black cage of death so I can at least see my father before we both die.
“Look at me!” Angela snarled, though the L and the M were rendered indistinguishable by her gruesome serrated teeth.
Reluctantly, Cody glanced up at her.
She was a freak show, her transformation more hideous even than before. In Mesquite she’d looked like a monster, but there had yet lingered a strong reminder of her other, human self in her features.
What faced him now was an abomination.
The mandibles were elongated, but they had widened too. The result of this widening was a fixed, monstrous grin that chilled him to the core. The icepick teeth moved slightly with her heavy breathing. Cody watched, fascinated, as the tapered tips first met, then punctured her gums. Blood trickled down her jaw, swirling with the noxious slaver that ran in runnels down her throat. Cody wanted to scream, but he would not provide her that one final triumph.
She tensed as if to attack, but the coach door swung open. They both looked and saw Adam Price peering up at them. “Have we reached a stalemate?” Price asked.
“She was about to kill me, if you call that a stalemate,” Cody answered.
“Then I’m afraid she’ll have to wait. We’ve reached the ranch.”
Angela climbed down and stood blinking, looking very much dazed by the intrusion of her master and the interruption of her feeding. Cody saw with a sinking feeling that they had indeed reached his father’s ranch. His dad had bought the place only six years before Cody had met Angela, so Cody never really considered it home. But still, he felt a sharp pang of regret as he regarded the modest but well-kept adobe house, the stables and barns that spread on either side of the homestead.
Penders had parked the Concord coach about thirty yards from the front gate, which was a simple, swinging wooden door constructed of three horizontal slats and their supports. The black quarter horses had halted only a few feet from the red coach, so that Cody could clearly see the faces of Martha Black and her boy as they climbed down. Horton followed them, looking far too eager for more carnage.
Cody turned away before Horton caught him staring. It was bad enough what the son of a bitch was about to do; Cody didn’t need to endure any more gloating about it. He peered at the hulking rock formation that lay just in front of the gate and to the left. Above that and in the distance, the tops of the Organ Mountains had begun to catch the first ghostly rays of the new sun, but it would be an hour or more before it could be considered daylight.
That was plenty of time for the devils to do whatever they planned.
Cody followed Price toward the others, who had massed to the left of the Concord. Angela trudged alongside him, looking surly and just as awful as she had in the coach.
When they stopped next to the others, Cody said, “You’re not going to have much time to kill us.”
“We got all the time in the world,” Penders said without turning. “That house’ll be nice and cool in the heat. Dark enough, too. We’ll have our fun in there.”
Cody’s insides shriveled. He tried but was unable to keep the panic out of his voice. “My dad won’t go down without a fight.”
Horton gave him a withering look. “There are six of us, dumbass. There’s only you, your daddy, and his squaw. And you don’t even count.”
“You don’t know my dad,” Cody said.
Horton grinned. “I’ll know him soon enough, won’t I? Him and his bitch?”
“I get to kill Cody’s father,” Angela croaked. “I get to rip out—”
But she never finished. Because at that moment they heard a thwacking sound followed by an abbreviated whoosh.
The arrow pierced Angela’s forehead dead center, its tip splitting through the back of her blond hair and glistening with what looked like a chunk of her brain. Her expression never changed. She sank to her knees and teetered there for a full three seconds. Then, as they all stared at her in stunned silence, she thumped forward face-first and lay without moving. Cody looked up.
A figure stepped out from behind the rock formation, a crossbow dangling at its side.
“She deserved to die first,” Marguerite said and brought up the crossbow. “Who wants to get it next?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“You died,” Martha Black said, gaping at Marguerite’s tensed figure. “You were in the cellar when the building burned.”
Cody grinned. “Looks like she found a way out.”
Bringing the crossbow to rest on Martha Black, Marguerite said, “I almost died. I thought I was dead. When the place started to go up, I smelled the smoke. I knew these monsters wouldn’t burn the place and stay inside it. I chanced it and made it out the kitchen window before it came down on top of me.”
Price’s tone was admiring. “And you saddled your horse and raced to this ranch.”
“It wasn’t my horse,” Marguerite said. “It belonged to one of my customers. I assume he’s dead now and won’t mind.”
Horton stepped forward. “You’re one saucy woman, Miss Marguerita. I bet you know how to ride.”
She shifted the crossbow until it was fixed on Horton’s face. “My father taught me about horses.”
“What else he teach you, sweetie? He teach you how to satisfy a man?”
“Careful, Billy,” Price said. “She will have roused the others.”
“What others?” Horton asked, chuckling. “The old man and his wife? Hell, he won’t be much. Can’t be if the only kind of son he could produce is Wilson here.”
The side of Horton’s head exploded.
After that everything happened very fast. Horton flopped down in the dust, his limbs flailing wildly in what Cody hoped were death spasms. He didn’t want to count his chickens too quickly, however. He’d seen Horton get shot in the head once before.
Price took cover behind the red coach, as did Willet and Mrs. Black. Penders took off in a lumbering sprint that nonetheless covered the space between where he’d stood and the clump of sage from which the shot had come with alarming speed.
Look out, Dad, Cody thought.
Marguerite stalked forward, tracking Penders with the crossbow as she moved.
In the head, Cody thought and broke toward the front of the red coach. Just like the last one, Marguerite. Get Penders in the head the same way you got Angela. He cast one last glance at Angela before he climbed up onto the Concord’s bench. She hadn’t stirred. Not yet at least.
Cody seized the reins, gave them a vicious snap, and the already bucking team leaped into action. At the same moment the rifle from the sage cracked again and spun Penders sideways.
But the shooter’s timing couldn’t have been worse. At that moment, the second crossbow arrow punctured Penders’s throat.
Damn it, Cody thought. If he hadn’t been shot first, Marguerite would’ve gotten him in the brain. No matter though. Cody drove the team toward Penders’s spinning form, meaning to both trample the huge man and to expose the three vampires who’d taken refuge behind the coach
.
The frightened sorrels and Appaloosas were pounding straight toward the bleeding man, who was simultaneously pawing at the arrow in his throat and transforming into a vampire. Just before the team rode over him, Penders wrested the arrow from his neck, turned and slammed the arrow’s tip into the exposed breast of the right lead horse. The sorrel shrieked, buckling in agony, and the whole rig bounced over Penders’s big body. Cody was ejected forward out of the box, the rig overturning behind him. Cody landed on his shoulder and tumbled end over end toward the fence. He came to rest on his belly, and in a half daze he saw a figure rise out of the sage and point a rifle at him.
Don’t shoot me, Dad! he thought.
But the figure didn’t shoot him.
And it wasn’t his father.
Gladys Wilson, Cody’s stepmother, reached into a California-style holster and drew out a pistol. Tossing it to Cody, she said, “Your daddy warned you about Angela, didn’t he?”
Cody caught the gun, a Colt .38, and uttered a breathless laugh. “If you’re the one doing the shooting, where the hell’s Dad?”
A cry to their left drew their attention. Adam Price, Willet and Willet’s mother had started toward them, but now they stopped, Mrs. Black letting loose with a surprised yelp.
Cody’s father strode out of the dark chaparral beside the black coach, a bone saw resting on his shoulder. Cody thought he’d wade right into the trio of vampires and take down as many as he could, but Jack Wilson instead marched over to where Horton lay. Though Horton’s body was still wracked with spasms, he didn’t look like he’d be standing up any time soon.
But Jack Wilson made sure of that.
“Don’t touch him!” Price called, his voice raw with fear.
Without answering, Cody’s father reached down, grasped the gunshot Horton by his bloody hair, and placed a knee on the man’s chest.
“I said don’t do—”
But before Price could finish, Jack Wilson began to saw through Horton’s throat.
Price hustled toward the pair, but Jack Wilson’s saw was too sharp, the jerking motion of his arm much too savage. Price was ten paces away when the head came off.
Jack Wilson stood. “Here you go,” he said and tossed Horton’s head toward Price.
The severed head rolled to a stop between Price’s black leather boots.
Price looked up slowly and stared at Jack Wilson. “You will suffer for this.”
Cody approached them, the Colt cocked and poised at his side. “It’s me you want, Price. Leave my dad out of this.”
“You’re all gonna pay,” a voice to Cody’s left said. He turned and looked at the one who’d spoken.
Willet leered at him, his white fangs gleaming in the faint morning light.
Cody’s first thought was I can’t do this. His second thought was that he better save his father from Adam Price, who wouldn’t be distracted for long. Ignoring the child who, less than twenty-four hours ago, had been his only friend in the world and was now a cold-blooded killing machine, Cody took aim at Price’s head.
“You had better shoot true,” Price said without turning. “If you don’t, I’ll have that measly little noisemaker out of your hands within seconds, and then you and your father will join the women inside for a day of agony.”
Marguerite moved up next to Cody. He could smell the sweat on her, wondered how much smoke she’d inhaled and how hard she’d had to ride to beat them here.
She looked ethereal.
“You’ve not yet noticed then,” Marguerite said to Price. “Your vulgar henchman has been beheaded, and that whore who took up with you has an arrow through her head.”
“It appears we’re at an impasse,” Mrs. Black said, her lips pursed.
“It’s four to three,” Gladys said. The rifle was pointed skyward as she sidled around the wrecked coach and approached them, but her face showed plainly that she meant business. Cody had never noticed it before, but his stepmother was a rather pretty woman. Not as beautiful as the two photographs he still had of his birth mother, but at least he could now see why his father had been attracted to Gladys. Her skin was tawny like Marguerite’s, but her Apache heritage was also clearly writ in her cheekbones and her hair. Gladys had nearly made it around the mangled coach when the horses that were still alive began to buck and whinny.
Mrs. Black eyed Gladys with resentment. “You don’t know Angela’s dead. For that matter, you don’t know that Mr. Penders is dead. We’re very resilient, you know.”
Jack Wilson was looking at the unmoving form of Cody’s once-wife. “Her? You telling me she might still come back to life?”
Mrs. Black gave a complacent little shrug. “If Adam wills it.”
“Well hell then,” Jack Wilson said and turned on his heels to walk over to Angela.
“What are you doing?” Price asked, the alarm back in his voice.
“What do you think I’m doing?” Jack Wilson said. He reached down, took hold of Angela’s blood-matted hair, and lifted her to a sitting position. The arrow jutting out of her forehead with the gaudy yellow fletching made her look like a sinister unicorn.
Cody’s dad examined her slack face. “She doesn’t look too spry to me.”
“Dad,” Cody began.
Angela’s eyes swung open.
Jack Wilson gasped, shrank away from the hissing vampire. Angela climbed drunkenly to her feet, arms extended toward Cody’s backpedaling father.
“Jack, look out!” Gladys yelled.
The horses still attached to the crashed rig neighed in terror.
“What’s wrong with them?” Marguerite asked.
Willet and Mrs. Black were both edging closer to Cody and Marguerite.
Angela sprung at Jack Wilson.
Faster than Cody would have thought possible, his dad came up with the Schofield and blasted another hole in Angela’s face, this one right in her teeth. Her head snapped back, the arrow momentarily pointing heavenward. Then she fell face-first on a bed of scree, the arrow point pushed farther out the back of her head.
Everyone froze for a pregnant moment. Then Jack Wilson bent over Angela with the bone saw. “I held my tongue when you were within earshot, little missy, but I don’t mind telling you now—I never liked you. Not one bit.” He rolled her over. Her glazed eyes peered sightlessly at the dimming stars. “You shouldn’t have hurt my boy,” he added and began to saw.
“No!” Adam Price bellowed and made for the pair.
Cody was after him instantly, gun raised. Beyond Price he could make out his father’s violent sawing motions, could hear the slushy tearing of Angela’s gullet as the saw teeth decapitated her by degrees.
Price was too fast for Cody, was almost upon Jack and Angela. Cody stopped, took aim. He knew if he fired wild his father might get hit, and wouldn’t that be something?
Don’t shoot wild then, he told himself.
Okay, Cody thought and squeezed the trigger.
The slug hit Price in the lower back, but it didn’t fell him. He spun sideways but staggered toward Jack Wilson.
Cody fired again, saw a splash of red between Price’s shoulder blades. Price went down a few feet from where Jack Wilson knelt over Angela. Then Cody’s father was up and grasping her severed head like Perseus after slaying Medusa. Price wormed toward Cody’s father, then pushed up to his knees.
“Here,” Jack Wilson said and flung the head at Price, who batted it aside. “Let’s have our next customer.”
And before Cody could stop him, his father was striding toward Adam Price. Jack Wilson brought up the bone saw and grasped Price by the collar.
“Dad!” Cody screamed.
His dad’s eyes widened, and at the last moment he tried to jerk his hand away. But by that time Adam Price had already sunk his fangs into Jack Wilson’s forearm.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cody bolted toward the struggling pair. His father swung the bone saw and embedded it in the meat of Price’s shoulder, but the vampire’s mouth
was riveted to Jack Wilson’s forearm, the slurping sounds telling Cody far more than he wanted to know. Price rose as Jack Wilson began to sink to his knees.
From his periphery Cody saw Willet go for Gladys. At the same instant, Mrs. Black attacked Marguerite. For an endless moment Cody stood frozen, plagued by an excruciating fit of indecision. Then his father’s howls broke through the uncertainty, and Cody made up his mind.
Cody tackled Adam Price on a dead sprint. There was a sick ripping sound as Price’s teeth came free of Jack Wilson’s arm. Price hit the ground with Cody atop him. Cody tumbled over, had the presence of mind to jerk the gun up, and as Price leaped at him, Cody opened up, the first slug vaporizing two of Price’s fingers, another slamming him in the ribs. But the vampire pounced on him anyway, Adam Price’s strength in no way diminished by the .38’s assault.
The struggle was brief. Cody threw an arm up, but Price caught his wrist, jerked the arm down hard enough to cause a dull pop in Cody’s shoulder. Price darted at Cody’s exposed neck, and though Price was impossibly fast, Cody was able to jerk his chin down in time to block Price’s lethal jaws. Price’s head came up, a goodly portion of Cody’s collar caught in the vampire’s scimitar teeth. Price spat the fabric aside, dove in again, but this time Cody anticipated him. With a desperate cry he interposed the barrel of the Colt sideways between his throat and the closing teeth. Price’s fangs snapped down on the unyielding steel. There came a horrid splintering noise as several of Price’s teeth shattered on the barrel. But rather than letting go of the gun, Price glared at Cody over the Colt, and Cody saw plainly that Price meant to wrest the gun from his hand with his teeth. Cody did the only thing he could think to do. He pulled the trigger.
The shot was deafening, Cody’s ears instantly filled with a high-pitched ringing. He let go of the gun and clapped his hands over his ears.
Price’s reaction, however, was even more dramatic. He pushed back on his knees, and an ungodly squeal fractured the early dawn air. Price’s taloned fingers battered his temples in rage and agony.
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