Both Barrels of Monster Hunter Legends (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 1)

by Josh Reynolds

  “Stray dogs. Hundreds, even. All skulking and wailing. I despise dogs, but they do make things so easy.” Smythe gave a low and wicked laugh. “What is a big black wolf to the average city-dweller but just another dog? In the country, there’d be pitchforks and shotguns at the first flurry of bloody feathers in a chicken-coop. Ireland was particularly bad. I got away from there as soon as I learned about boats. But here-ah. Dog eat dog, as they say. Dog eat man, too. Heh.” Smythe clapped his hands together sharply. “They say people come to the city to find a better life. Or an easier one.”

  “Some people find neither,” St. Cyprian said, peering into the darkness.

  A sigh. “Too true.” Smythe’s pale face appeared out of the darkness. He was nude, and his flesh gleamed like marble in what little light there was. “I quite liked being an artist. I wonder whatever I shall be next?”

  “Depends on your karma,” St. Cyprian said, firing. Glass shattered as the bullet struck the mirror where Smythe’s gloating face had been reflected. St. Cyprian whirled as Gallowglass gave a cry and the great black wolf lunged for them, jaws wide. A moment later, the floor gave a groan and the wooden boards beneath St. Cyprian’s feet snapped and splintered, causing him to tumble headlong!

  Gallowglass grabbed his wrist as he fell and he struck the wall with a bone-rattling thump. He looked down and immediately wished he hadn’t. Beneath him was a swirling sea of snapping jaws and hunger-maddened gazes. Dogs. Dozens of them. Every breed of street mongrel possible, scrambling out from under eaves and through doorways. And all of them baying now, and leaping for him.

  “Jesus Christ!” Gallowglass said, trying to haul him back up while keeping a grip on her Webley. St. Cyprian tried to help her, but there was nowhere to dig his fingers in, or even to brace himself.

  “I built the deadfall myself. I was a carpenter, once, before I was an artist,” Smythe said, slinking into view on the opposite side of the hole. He squatted at the edge of the pit and looked down. If it was possible, the dogs seemed to make an even greater racket. “Filthy beasts,” he murmured. “The first night I was here, they attacked me. Dozens of mongrels, coming at me from everywhere. They seem to understand instinctively that I’m their enemy. Moreso than people at any rate. Then, animals don’t see the shape, do they? They only see the smell.” He tapped his nose.

  St. Cyprian ignored him and tried to gain some purchase on the wooden walls of the improvised pit. Unfortunately, all he got for his efforts were splinters. Gallowglass slid slightly, and gritted her teeth as she tried to keep hold of him.

  Smythe went on, oblivious. “After I secured this place for myself, I began to lead them here. To trap them down there. I blocked off the door and the windows. Made it a proper wolf-pit, you might say.” He stood and began to sidle around the edge of the hole. “I hoped they’d starve, but instead the stronger ones ate the weaker ones! So I lured more of them in, but they just wouldn’t die. As a game, I fed them the leftovers of my own meals, but it doesn’t quite satisfy them.” He peered down and smiled. “Sometimes I paint them.” He looked at Gallowglass. “If you let him fall, you might make it to the door.”

  “You—” she began, trying to shift her increasingly slippery grip so that she could use her pistol. It was no use however. Smythe tossed back his head and laughed.

  “Maybe I’ll even paint this. I’ll bet dear old Bobbie will just love it,” he snarled, snapping his teeth together. “It’ll be my farewell masterpiece, I think.” He hunched forward, curling his fingers. “I hear America is nice. Full of cities and great wide swathes of nothing. Maybe I’ll go there next. Last chance my dear. Run.” Those last words were drawn out into a rasping growl as pale flesh was seemingly swept beneath a tide of black, coarse hair. Like water going down a drain, Gabriel-Ernest Smythe gave way to the black wolf as Gallowglass watched in horrified fascination.

  The wolf shook itself and tensed, hindquarters quivering as it prepared to leap the gap separating it from its prey. St. Cyprian twisted desperately. “Drop the pistol!” he bawled.

  Gallowglass blinked and did as he bade. The Webley dropped like a stone and he pulled away from her, snatching it even as he fell. The wolf leapt, snarling triumphantly. The pistol barked, St. Cyprian firing as he crashed to the floor below. The wolf twisted in the air, snapping at its hindquarters as if it had been stung by a wasp. Its leap interrupted, it too fell with a piteous cry, crashing down a few feet from the dazed St. Cyprian.

  The dogs surrounded them both, the harsh sound of their panting filling the air. The wolf staggered up and gave a growl that shook the timbers. The dogs ignored it, their gazes hungry. The stink of blood filled the room. The wolf favored its left hind-leg and it wobbled as it turned, trying to keep all of the dogs in view.

  St. Cyprian rose, breathing heavily, his insides burning. He’d hurt something coming down, and he’d lost the pistol. Luckily, the dogs didn’t seem to be very interested in him. What was it Smythe had said-they understood instinctively that the wolf was their enemy. Had, in fact, always been their enemy, for as long as man and dog had been partners.

  Their eyes met. Smythe’s yellow orbs no longer held mocking amusement. Now they held only the berserk terror of the wolf in a trap. The wolf howled, and the dogs lunged as one, yapping and snarling. St. Cyprian threw himself backwards as four-legged, half-starved bodies blundered past him. He turned towards the boarded over windows and began to run as best he was able. His last sight of Gabriel-Ernest Smythe was as a struggling, screaming shape buried beneath a hairy avalanche.

  St. Cyprian hit the closest window with a force born of desperation and crashed out onto the street in a cloud of wood splinters and dusty glass. He lay for a moment, trying to breath, and then forced himself to remain still as a number of dogs, their muzzles dripping red, burst out of the broken window and scattered into the East End.

  The next thing he saw was Gallowglass hurrying towards him. She helped him to his feet.

  “Is he—” he coughed.

  “There’s not enough left of him to cause any trouble if he’s not,” she said. “What happened down there?” St. Cyprian was silent for a moment and they sat and watched as a lanky mongrel squirm out of the broken window and trot away, a hank of something black and red dangling from its jaws.

  “I learned what kills werewolves,” he said finally.

  Rancho Diablo

  John M. Whalen

  He followed the faint trail left by the man-wolf known as Mitch Logan over the unforgiving terrain of the Sonoran desert for three days. It was a hellish country of burning heat and dry air that made your skin feel like it was peeling off, with only snakes and scorpions for company. It was hardly a trail at all that he followed and no one except Mordecai Slate could have tracked it. It was instinct that led him most of the way, an unfailing sense that somehow allowed him to detect even the faintest trace of the inhuman prey that he hunted. The trail led to the Cabeza Prieta Mountains, west of Yuma. There were wolves in those mountains—Mexican grey wolves—and the night before, he had heard them howl far off in the distance as he hunkered near his campfire. He wondered if it was one of them that had bitten Mitch Logan and turned him into the thing that he now hunted.

  It was late afternoon of the third day when the jagged, reddish peaks of the Prietas reared up in front of him against a cobalt sky. The trail was clear now. The hooves of many horses coming from many directions had gone this way, and all turned into a narrow ravine that cut into the side of the mountain. Slate led his buckskin into the narrow space between the sandstone walls, rode a quarter mile into the canyon and pulled up, only half-surprised by what he saw.

  The Spanish-style buildings—a two story hacienda, two bunk houses and a stable—stood amidst the green of vegetation; the only green he had seen for a hundred miles, and all locked inside these canyon walls. He’d had a hunch this was where Logan was headed. Slate knew that he had found more than just one fugitive’s hiding place; he had discovered the legendary hideout that had be
en used by countless outlaws. Rumors of its existence had been whispered for years, but no one outside of the outlaws who hid there knew where to find it.

  But he knew. The place he was looking at was Rancho Diablo. Stories were told of the woman who ran the place—Liz DuVal. Slate smiled grimly as he wondered what she would think if she knew one of her boarders was a lycanthrope.

  He heard the sound of a Winchester being levered behind him.

  “Raise ’em,” a voice said.

  Slate raised his hands. A man came out from behind a boulder ahead of him. He could sense the other man with the Winchester higher up, probably on a ledge in back of him.

  “Don’t move,” said the man in front. He held a revolver on Slate and came up close to him. He lifted Slate’s .45 from its holster and slid the Colt Model 1855 carbine out of the saddle sleeve. He looked at it curiously, noting the silver-plated revolving cylinder.

  “A revolving rifle,” he said. “I heard of ’em, but ain’t never seen one before.”

  “It’s special made,” was all Slate offered.

  “What are you doing here?” the man said. “This is private property.”

  Slate decided he’d better improvise. “I came to see if I could stay a few days.”

  “What do you mean by ‘stay?’”

  “I heard a man with enough money could find shelter,” Slate said.

  “You on the run?”

  “You could say that.”

  The man looked over at the man behind Slate. “What do you think? Kill him here?”

  “Take him to the ranch,” the other man said. “Let her decide.”

  “Get off your horse, mister,” the man holding Slate’s guns said. “We’ll walk from here.”

  The gunman behind Slate jumped down to the ground and the two men led Slate across the canyon floor, through the open space in the middle of a low wall made of boulders, to a brick courtyard that stood in front of the big hacienda. A man stood on the veranda in front of the entrance to the house with his arms folded across his chest.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “Says he needs a place to stay, Tom,” the man holding Slate’s guns said.

  “I’ll get Liz.”

  The man went into the house. The guards kept their eye on Slate while they waited and soon smaller footsteps sounded on the porch. A tall, good-looking blonde woman, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, walked out to the edge of the veranda. She stood for a moment with her hands on hips, the flannel shirt tight across her breasts. Slate could see that her eyes were clear blue, even though she stood some distance away in the shade. She stepped down off the porch and came towards him.

  Tom, the man who had run in to fetch her, returned with a rifle and joined the other two who covered Slate.

  “Who are you, mister?” the woman asked.

  “Name’s Jackson, ma’am,” Slate answered. He didn’t want to give his real name. If Logan was still here, he might know who he was. Lycanthropes everywhere knew the name Mordecai Slate, and they feared it. “Ed Jackson. I hoped I could find some lodging here for a few days.”

  “What does this look like,” she said. “A hotel?”

  “This is Rancho Diablo, isn’t it?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I can pay for my stay,” Slate said. “There’s gold in my saddle bags.”

  “Strangers aren’t welcome here. My guests are all people I know. You might be the law, for all I know.”

  “No chance of that,” Slate said.

  “You wanted?”

  “A little trouble back in Contention,” Slate said. He’d heard about a robbery that happened there several weeks ago. “A bank teller went for a gun.”

  The woman turned to the man named Tom. “Get Mitch,” she said. “Bring him out here.”

  The man ran back inside the house. A minute later a tall, broad-chested man in a blue shirt came out. It was the Mitch Logan, and though Slate had never laid eyes on him before, he knew two things about him. He knew he was the man he had tracked here, and from the way he and Liz DuVal looked at each other, he knew that there was something between them.

  “Mitch,” Liz DuVal said. “You know this man?”

  Logan looked Slate up and down. His eyes were cold and hard. “Can’t say I do.”

  “He says he robbed a bank in Contention,” the woman said. “You hear anything about that?”

  “Seems I did,” Logan said. “A teller was killed.” He looked over at Slate in surprise. “You pull that job?”

  “Claims he did,” Liz said. “All right, Mr. Jackson. You’ve got a place to stay. It’s $20 a day, a hundred for the week.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Slate said.

  “You can pay inside,” she said. “You’ll get your guns back when you leave. Only the people who work for me carry guns here.”

  Slate shrugged. “Whatever you say, ma’am.”

  She smiled, a glint in her eye. “That’s right, Mr. Jackson,” she said. “Remember that.” Slate walked toward his horse, and could feel Mitch Logan’s dark eyes following him. Slate grabbed the saddlebags off the buckskin.

  “Just a minute,” Logan said. “Tom, check the saddle bags.”

  Tom grabbed the leather bags and opened them and looked inside. “They’re all right,” he said. Slate took them back. A Mexican boy ran up to him.

  “Stable your horse, senor?” he asked. “A dollar.”

  Slate took a silver coin out of the pocket of his dark colored pants and tossed it to him. “Make sure you feed and water him good. Wash the dust off him.”

  The boy grabbed the reins and ran the horse over to the stable. Liz DuVal waited on the porch and Mitch Logan stood next to her, both of them watching Slate as he climbed up the wooden steps and crossed the verandah.

  “Come in, Mr. Jackson, and see what your money’s buying you,” Liz said.

  Slate passed through the doorway and entered a spacious room that appeared to be a combination of a cantina and a hotel lounge. There was a bar, tables, and some soft leather chairs scattered around the place. Eight men sat in the room, most of them at tables. It was dinner, and they looked up from their steaks and chops and whiskeys at the newest guest of Rancho Diablo.

  “Come over to the bar,” Liz said. “Wash some of that desert out of your throat.”

  Slate followed her and Logan to the knotty-pine bar and took a stool. Logan sat next to him and Liz went behind the bar and pulled an unlabeled decanter and three glasses. Slate rested the saddlebag on the bar top and sniffed the alcohol in the glass she slid toward him.

  “Bonded whiskey,” he said.

  “Only the best for my guests,” Liz said. She raised her glass.

  Slate clinked his drink against hers, tossed the Scotch, and it went down smooth. Logan drank his and set the glass down, his narrow eyes squinting at Slate.

  “How’d you find the Rancho?” he asked. “It’s not exactly on the beaten path.”

  “A friend of mine told me how to get here,” Slate said. He was thinking fast. He’d run into a hired killer named Johnny Draco the year before, who had once told him about this place. He never revealed its location, but Logan and Liz DuVal didn’t know that. “Johnny Draco told me if I was ever in trouble, this was the place to light out to.”

  “Draco, huh?” DuVal said. “I remember him. How is he?”

  “Dead.”

  “Wondered why I hadn’t heard from him lately,” she said.

  “You kill him?” Logan asked.

  Slate met his steely gaze. “No,” he said. “Sheriff in Tombstone got him.”

  The two men sat eyeball to eyeball for a minute. Slate could tell the man was bristling for a fight.

  “You can pay now,” Liz said, breaking up the tension. “How long you planning to stay?”

  “I’ll pay up for a week,” Slate said. He opened one of the saddlebags. “Not sure how much longer I’ll be.”

  He took a pouch out of the leather bag and extracted five
twenty-dollar gold pieces that made a flat metallic sound when he dropped them on the bar. Liz picked up the coins and walked over to the wall behind the bar where keys hung on hooks. She picked one off and handed it to him.

  “Room seven,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “Is that your lucky number?” she asked.

  “Could be,” Slate said.

  “Not there,” Logan said. “Put him in one of the bunk houses.”

  “Why?” Liz asked. “We’re empty this week. There’s plenty of room in the hacienda. No reason to send him out there unless you don’t want him in the house?”

  “No.” Logan spat. “Put him wherever you want. You always have your way, anyway.”

  She smirked and put the bottle of Scotch on the back bar.

  “Up the stairs, second door on your left,” she told Slate. “After you wash up, come down and have some dinner.”

  Slate grabbed his saddlebags and headed for the stairs. He could feel Logan’s hatred burning into his back as he climbed up.

  Slate made use of the tub that was in the room. He sat in the water, his Meerschaum pipe clenched between his teeth, enjoying the taste of the tobacco. The hot water and soap felt good and he could feel the desert soaking out of his pores. He looked out the window on the other side of the room and saw the moon already rising above the canyon rim. It was getting dark. It would be the first night of the full moon.

  It was what happened on the last full moon that had brought him here—the full moon that had brought the death of a rancher’s son. Hayden Carter, owner of the Lazy C, the biggest cattle ranch on the Sasabe, had watched his son die. He thought he had seen him attacked by a wolf. It was dark but he heard his son’s screams mingled with the horrendous roar of the beast that attacked him. He ran to get his rifle and when he came back, he saw it was not a wolf. It was a man, naked, his skin glistening with blood in the moonlight, standing over the torn remains of his boy. The shock of it froze Carter, and he recovered too late. The naked man sprung at him, tore the rifle away and knocked him down. He hit his head on a fence post. When he came to, the man was gone, but the shredded corpse of his son still lay where it had fallen.