A life slaying demons, only to be slain by one, Father Justino thought. He held the demon’s gaze, and even though he didn’t pity her, he felt no pleasure as her life ebbed away. He knew the revenge he so desperately sought, had always been against himself.
Without strength to speak or pray, he closed his eyes. The hands of death gripped his soul, lessening his pain. His desire for vengeance faded as calm swept over him, and after a last sigh, he ceased to exist.
Weeping Woman
H.J. Hill
She sat at the round, rugged table in the corner of the dim-lit inn’s dining hall, a homespun travel cloak the color of the forest she had left behind pulled close around her against the piercing, snow-flecked drafts that forced their way through the creaking door every time it opened to admit another traveler. Her head bowed low over a leather-bound book she held open in her lap. Unusual to see a woman of any age travelling alone in rough country, he thought, but this one did not have youth on her side. If she found herself in a rocky place, she would not be able to run fast enough to escape—weak and prosperous, a likely target for wayward men. So easily, so quickly, she could end up robbed, violated, dead. She was perfect, just the way he liked his victims.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am.” He stood five feet from her chair and still his shadow towered over her. He would not get far if she felt ill at ease from the outset.
“You have it.” She lifted her eyes but not her head.
The weight she gave to each word shook him. It was no flimsy courtesy. She meant what she said. “I just wondered…you being by yourself and all…I’m a guide hereabouts. I hire out for cheap. If you can use a man like me, I’d be happy to escort you on your way.”
She placed the black satin ribbon marker against the seam of her book’s spine, pulling it taut, and then straightening it with her thumb so it would not crease or wrinkle. Smoothing the tissue page with the flat of her hand, she pressed the leather covers closed and laid the book on the table. “I should thank you for your offer. Under the circumstances though, I won’t, and I will decline to employ you as a guide or anything else.”
He bristled and then subsided. “Under what circumstances? Look, ma’am, if I have offended against you, I apologize. I just…”
“You missed offending against me, sir, because I refuse to allow you to offend against me. Your plan has failed. You may not escort me or do anything else to me. I have business that will not wait and I need no guide.” She stood and gathered her book and her pack.
“A woman in business out here? And what business would that be?” He almost sneered but pulled it back. He might still persuade her, deceive her. He might still leave her lying dead on the llano.
“I hunt…a creature.” She looked him up and down. “But not a creature such as yourself. Something as dangerous but much more subtle.”
“I’m a hunter. I can track anything. I have killed many wild beasts. I can hunt your creature for you. For a comfortable price.”
Her eyes were focused on the far wall or beyond it, on something he could not see. “Not the creature I seek. I doubt she would let you approach close enough.”
“She? What is it, a wildcat, a bear?”
She stared him in the eye until he cringed and a shiver ran up his spine. “I wish it were that simple, that innocent.” The sharp wind keened through the cracks around the door. She jerked her head at the sound. “There she is.”
“It was the wind.”
“It was a scream.” She did not bother to close the door on the way out.
Her gray gelding blended into the fading winter sky as night ran the fleeing light over the horizon. The horse’s hooves chopped the drying clay and scattered chunks of it onto both sides of the trail, a thin tracing in the wild earth invisible to anyone not expecting to see it. A fingernail scratching a line in the dirt could not have made a harder trail to follow, but it was not what she saw that led her on. It was what she heard. The others in the town she had just left thought the coyotes were on edge because of the norther blowing in. Saida heard no coyote. The high-pitched wailing was unnatural. It was obviously not from a coyote or a crow. The keening cry was no hawk or eagle soaring over its prey or calling for its mate. If the townsmen had but listened as they always should have done, they would have noticed the difference.
The cry mimicked the braying complaint of a wounded donkey, only higher in pitch, and it was moving west at speed. It called to her, taunting her. Saida grieved that she had not put the voice’s owner out of their shared misery a long time ago. She halted her horse at a wide, fast-running creek, dismounted, and laid her fingers across the sticky footprints in the mud.
“Those tracks belong to a woman,” said the dangerous man from the inn. He had spurred his mount to the point of exhaustion just to keep up with her. She was talented. He had to grant her that. Twice she had disappeared on him, less than a shadow in a mist.
His appearance caused Saida no surprise. “I can see how you would mistake them. No woman made these marks. They are the prints of a monster.” She scanned the opposite creek bank and spotted where her quarry had emerged from the water. Either the creature was not savvy enough to cover her tracks or she did not care that Saida was following. Her prints were obvious to any eye that cared to see. “What are you doing here, Mr. Morne?”
“How do you know my name? I didn’t give it.”
“Handing out your name is not the only way one may learn it. The stableman was deep in his cups and eager to talk to anyone. So again, what is your purpose here?”
“What is your purpose here?”
“You were following me. I need not explain myself.”
Morne dismounted. He slid his knife from his belt as he walked toward her. “Your tongue needs shortening.” But the blade fell uselessly to the ground as his right hand lost its grip. The blood drained out of it and just as quickly as she had drawn it, her long knife rested again in its horizontal belt sheath along the flat of her back.
The scream a few seconds later did not come from Morne though it could have by rights. He held his sliced, dripping fingers before his bulging eyes. Saida ignored him, turning to the source of the wail. It crawled on the air between the scrawny, twisted trees that bent their stunted trunks against the harsh wind. The sound grated like a razor shaving the skin too close. Saida stalked toward the trees. The coming dark would hide the prey and hide her as well. The beast possessed no greater powers in the night than she did in broad daylight. Nightfall was no reason to delay.
La Llorona. The mention of her sent children scurrying to hide in dark closets. The monster had no name that anyone living knew. Some said it was one thing; some said it was another. La Llorona. Because of the crying and wailing, Saida’s people gave her the title, a monster that caused grief, one that called on fear the way a warrior called on an ally. Fright was her best weapon. It made her pursuers, when she had any who dared to chase her, cringe and flee. They ran home and lied, making up fables of how they had triumphed over her in a fierce and bloody fight when really all they had done was to cower and hide and, at their first chance, run. Those the hunters lied to always noticed that, for all the bloody fights they claimed, there was never any blood on them. They noticed that the hunters never declined to take their fees as a reward even though they had no proof of La Llorona’s destruction. And they always noticed that La Llorona cried again at the next Death Moon and more children disappeared.
“Where are you?” Saida whispered the question, hoping not to be answered, hoping nothing would be heard on the cold wind. She felt unready.
Icy fingers gripped the back of her neck, their nails digging into her flesh. She tore away in time to see Morne’s eyes go wide and freeze in their sockets. The bray pierced the air from over her right shoulder. Morne staggered backward, holding his good hand toward the apparition, groaning in terror. Saida forced herself to turn around. She dared herself to look. La Llorona floated inches above the ground. Her face, the image of a donkey, til
ted down to where Morne had fallen, her tear ducts dripping blood into the sand by the creek where it froze into tiny black rocks of ice. Morne fainted.
Saida jerked her wide blade from its sheath. The silver metal glowed in the frigid light of the ice-cloaked full moon. She stabbed at La Llorona’s throat but missed. Still the monster screamed, throwing her head back, closing her blood-encrusted eyelids, bellowing her grief. Saida charged the beast, but La Llorona was fast and not bound to the earth. She floated backward over the creek, her pointed feet skipping over the water, her white dress whipping in the wind, tattered, ragged, frayed along every edge. She stood poised over the stream and spread her arms wide, inviting the attack. Saida rushed her, the winter water splashing up to her knees. She felt it and scorned it. Quickly her feet grew numb, but she plowed them through the rushing creek like piles of bricks being dragged across the rocky bed.
“Why do you pursue me? We are not enemies, you and I.” La Llorona’s head shifted its shape. A sad, beautiful woman’s face appeared, reforming a moment later into a horror with sunken black eyes, bleeding dark tears.
Saida refused to answer the beast, refused to stop, refused to slow her struggling fight against the current.
“We are not enemies.” La Llorona’s voice soothed from beneath the braying donkey’s throaty call. It softened, quieted, and she wrapped it in subtlety. Loud and brash had not worked to frighten the woman. She would use the tone she took with wayward young men. “We are the same.”
Saida stopped. Her leaden feet skidded in the loose pebbles under the surface. She heard a noise like short bursts of air with pauses every second or so and then knew it was the sound of her panting, in and out, in a rhythm like an exhausted dog on a hot, weary day. She glanced around. She had toiled a quarter of a mile upstream pursuing the monster from the point where they had started their fight. Saida leaned into the current, the hurrying water piling up around her knees before rushing on downstream, trailing her riding skirt behind her, deepening it from its shaded green to the coal black of a widow’s train.
La Llorona blinked her opaque eye sockets and more blood-stained tears fell. Her eyes revealed no white, no color at all. They were obsidian marbles sunken into the sepulcher of her face. “Why do you struggle against me? Are we not both women? Have we not both suffered great loss?” The beast floated closer to Saida but stayed out of the reach of the long knife. “You have sought me long.”
Saida struggled to keep her mouth shut. Arguing with demons opened dangerous doors, but her tongue flew against her opponent. “No nearly long enough!”
“True. You are not like the others. You delayed far too long.”
Saida slashed with the knife and missed again. “Murderer! The innocent you have slain cry out from the graves where you have hidden them.”
La Llorona wailed and Saida forced her hands over her ears, still gripping the handle of her knife. She squeezed her eyelids together. The shriek hurt every part of her, but she stood her ground. The cry tore into her heart, mournful, deep, ancient. She felt it more than heard it. When she looked at the monster once more, La Llorona’s face bore wide black streaks of drying tears.
The monster screeched in anguish and her bray returned, her face elongating, losing its soft lines. Her nostrils grew large and round and her skin grew hair and stretched thin over long bones. “I am punished more than I can bear. What would you have of me?”
“I would stop you. I would end your crimes.”
La Llorona ceased her crying. Her voice shifted suddenly from the loud donkey’s grate to a whisper. “Then you should have brought something sharper than that knife.”
A blow harder than a mule’s kick caught Saida in the middle, doubled her over, and pitched her from her feet into the black creek.
A rock-peppered sandbar snagged her and the creek threw her onto it before she could drown. The polished walnut grip of her knife stuck to the palm of her frozen hand. Crystals of ice rimmed her face, mixing their white with the gray and coffee brown of her long hair. Her broad-brimmed hat hung by its cord down her front, a soft, felt shield that stopped nothing but the gusting wind. The sun beat back the clouds and poured its thin heat over her.
Wood smoke stung the air. A narrow tower of it rose from within a windbreak of scrub oak around the bend in the water’s course. She could not see the source, but she could guess it.
“You survived the night,” she said. Morne shot to his feet and reached for his pistol belt, only to realize too late that he had left it inconveniently hanging from his saddle. He had retrieved her gray gelding and the two horses were tied yards away to a willow that hung its head over the flowing water.
“You did, too. That’s a shame.” He was cooking a rabbit he had snared with a cord secreted under leaves and brush. His injured hand was bound with a stained kerchief and he shook it at her with the force of a reproving teacher. “Look what you did! It may never be whole again!”
“Considering what you have used it for in the past, that’s a blessing. And to be truthful, I did not cause your wounds. You did.” Saida approached the small fire, craving any part of its heat and willing to have to fight Morne for it if need be.
Morne backed away. “You sure got a short memory. That knife of yours was quick and sharp yesterday when you tried to cut my hand off.”
“You mean when you were about to gut me with yours? My knife is not capable of such damage to the innocent, Mr. Morne.” She pulled it out and he flinched and backed further away. Saida drew the naked, silver edge hard across her open palm with a snap and held her uninjured hand toward him so he could see. There was no cut, no mark on it, no blood, not even a scratch to show that it had passed over her skin.
“What are you?” he asked. His knees buckled and he sank to the soft sand.
“The question is, what are you?” she said. “The answer will explain why you were wounded by this knife and I was not.”
“How come you’re not cut?”
She turned the swirling surface of the Damascus blade in the sunlight, its honed edge catching and casting the light into Morne’s eyes. “This is an old weapon forged a world away. I received it from the hand of a priest back home. He blessed it for a specific purpose.” She stepped closer to Morne and he inched backward on his knees. “Because you see, Mr. Morne, there are righteous weapons for righteous uses. This knife cuts those who harm the innocent and it worked on you. So tell me about your innocent victims? Where have you left them?”
He bolted for his horse and fumbled to untie it from its willow branch. “Stay away from me! I want no part of this! No, ma’am! You and that knife. That…whatever that donkey-faced thing was last night.”
She strode up on him, her knife aimed at his back. “You took part in this when you followed me, when you ambushed me. I gave you a chance to leave well enough alone. You did not take it. Whatever monster drives you drove you this time onto the rocky shoals of my mercy and stranded you here at the point of my knife.”
The fingers on Morne’s uninjured hand crawled toward his pistol.
“Do not think for a second that that is going to save you.” She jabbed the tip of the blade into his side below his ribcage, twisting it to good effect. A bloodstain the size of a woman’s fingertip bled into his cotton shirt. “It won’t take much to bury this blade and end your journey, so try me at your peril.”
“You are a mean one.”
“You’d know about mean, I figure.”
“Would you stab a man in the back?”
“As quickly as you would stab a woman.”
He eased his hand away from the holster hanging over his saddle’s cantle. “I will ride away and you will see me no more forever. I’ll even leave you that rabbit on the spit and you can have the fire. That’ll do, won’t it, ma’am?”
Saida turned grim and smiled. “No, that will not do at all.”
Drifting in from the east, dusk draped the wilderness early and the bent trees turned black in silhouette against the
shrouded horizon. La Llorona saw the figure hunched over the small fire, dark green travel cloak loosely blanketing its shoulders, broad black hat pulled low, sheltering the shadowy face. She inhaled the cold evening, catching a familiar odor.
“I felt you to be a kindred spirit when we met,” she said. Her feet hovered an inch above the creek bank. “I am not surprised to find you here. You have survived and have not fled in terror as the others did. But you will not succeed in defeating me.”
The fire popped and another stick of oak cracked in half, eaten away by the flames.
“Speak. What do you seek from me?”
The cloaked figure threw off the garment and the hat and rose to stand in front of La Llorona.
“Help me!” Morne croaked in a rasping whisper. He held his bounds hands out to her, hoping she could cut him free without cutting him.
Too late, La Llorona noted a different scent on the air. She threw her head back, seeking its source, and the veteran blade of Damascus pierced her core. She wailed, pain and sorrow mingling in her cry, fresh tears of blood rolling over the dried ones on her face.
Saida gritted her teeth and turned the knife clockwise. “You sensed a kindred spirit, but it wasn’t mine.”
La Llorona screamed, then groaned, dissipating into mist that the wide blade absorbed and held trapped. The last sound lingered on the air and floated downstream.
Morne left his mouth hanging open, his roped hands still extended before him, suspended in the frost. “Where’d she go?”
“To a place you want to avoid, Mr. Morne.”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Give you one more chance.”
“Chance for what?”
“A chance to change. A chance for redemption. The chance you didn’t give your victims.”
Morne sagged. “Good. I thought you were going to chase me with that knife.” He frowned at the darkening sky and back at the fire. “Why give me another chance when you know what I am?”
Both Barrels of Monster Hunter Legends (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 1) Page 40