by Amanda Jones
Then the stranger slid from the saddle with a twist, keeping his shoulders facing toward Rufen and his followers. His right hand rose from behind his bike gripping a long object, which he thrust into his belt.
“What’s the problem, stranger?” Rufen re-clipped his whip to his side.
The rider’s long black leather jacket hung just past his waist. I recognized the design as one of ours. He stood stock still for a long moment while Rufen’s crew fidgeted and Rufen stared back at him.
His shoulders dropped and he gave Rufen an easy nod. He turned to me.
“Are you Jeslie Mathers?”
I shook my head quickly, studying his face. Eyes hidden behind dark glasses. Long blond hair like a lion’s mane, stiff from the wind and dust. A deep, strong jaw supported by corded muscles dropping down his neck into his black t-shirt.
“That’s my name.”
“Is your gas clean?” He took his sunglasses off and set them on his saddle.
“We just filled the tank. We use a lot of it, here. Ethanol-free.”
His cheeks burned from the wind and sun with eyes bluer than the summer sky, more like the color of the local turquoise beads we sew on some of our decorated jackets than eyes made from flesh and blood.
“Would you mind if I filled up? It’s a long way back to town.” He jerked his chin back toward Signal Hill, keeping his eyes locked on my eyes.
“Of course, take what you need.” I thrust my shoulders back and lowered my eyes. “Anything you want.” Looking into his pupils was like staring into the ancient train tunnels that ran miles under Iron Butte.
The stranger turned his body back toward the bike, keeping an eye toward Rufen’s men. They stood in a line, blocking him from seeing Aubrey lying on the ground. Rufen glared at me, his mouth set in a hard line.
Pulling a rag out, the rider rubbed dust off his tank and with caressing motions like you might sooth a tired animal after a long ride. In a long moment of silence everyone stared as he wiped his iron horse. After one last dust clearing swipe the stranger turned his chrome gas cap. Then he stopped and eyed Rufen. Then me.
“If you knew my name, you might change your mind.”
You can’t be worse than Rufen and his Sunwalkers. “I don’t care who you are. Fill up your bike.”
I put my chin up.
“Are you hungry? Thirsty? Please come in and refresh yourself. In my house.” I emphasized the ‘my’.
fourteen
“Help her mister,” Aubrey shouted, pushing through Rufen’s crew, chain dragging in the dust. The stranger’s eyebrows rose as he squared up on the bound man.
“Looks like I crashed someone’s party.”
“You did, sir and I didn’t like the theme. I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
“These boys, their jackets all have the same design? Like they’re in a club.”
“The Sunwalkers motorcycle club, stranger,” Rufen lowered his dark eyebrows. “If you got a right mind, you’ll clear out after you fill your tank.”
The new rider held my eyes, ignoring Rufen.
“Sunwalkers. I heard of you.” The tanned newcomer gave Rufen a judging look. “You all seem a bit pale for Arizona.”
Rufen spat on the ground. When he spoke his voice boomed deeper than usual. Putting up a front. Like an old bull dog growling at a wild wolf. “I run the Western Sunwalkers. This is our land, mister. Our rules.”
The stranger turned away from Rufen as if he hadn’t heard him speak a word. “These Sunwalkers, they’re acting like this boy did something to them. Did he steal their bikes? Sleep with their wives? Spill their beer?”
“He didn’t do any of that,” I said.
“But it looks like he did something. Did he piss on their boots? What’d he do to get chained like that?”
“He didn’t do anything to them.”
Aubrey did some stuff to me, but that was not the stranger’s business any more than Rufen’s.
“He’s innocent.”
The blonde rider put his hand back to the handle of the thing he’d stuck in his belt. He moved a couple feet forward and to the side, putting himself between me and the men.
“You’re sure about that, Miss Mathers?”
“His name’s Aubrey Wills. You ask him what he’s done.”
“No, he can’t do that.” Rufen stepped forward, pulling his shirt up and showing the black handled gun stuck in his pants. “You’ve been here long enough, stranger. You’ve got leathers, you’ve got a bike. You know what territory is. You know this is ours.”
The wanderer in black squinted at Rufen.
“I hear this is the Mathers’ ranch.” He jerked his chin in my direction, keeping his eyes on Rufen. “Her factory. They made my jacket here. I came here to thank them. I find a scared woman, a tied up boy, and a congregation of Sunwalkers acting like they own the wind.”
fifteen
“That’s what you found and we do own this land. We earned it, we paid the blood price.”
“The stamp on my jacket says Maple Creek Leathers, Mathers Family, since 1912. Nothing about Sunwalkers. Nothing about blood.”
“You’re on the edge of nowhere, here, brother. We’re the law. We decide who owns what, and what they get to keep.”
The stranger shouldered out of his jacket. Johnny and Rufen’s other men put their hands on their guns.
“Take it easy, brothers,” the stranger repeated the word, raising his lip to show alabaster teeth.
What long canines he has.
“Let me show you how nice this work is.”
He turned the jacket around so the design faced the men. A hammer, with wings and lightning bolts. Arching above it in angular letters, “Sons of Thunder.” Below the hammer, “Arizona Legion.”
Rufen gasped and pulled out his gun.
“I heard of the Sons. They got no Arizona Legion.”
“They do now,” the stranger said.
Rufen’s men behind him stepped back from the pair. Johnny moved to Rufen’s side, holding up his own huge revolver.
“What’s your name, tell me now or I’m going to cap you and never know.”
Facing the gun, with his left hand the rider hooked his jacket over his bike’s handlebars. The big slate-gray hammer popped from the black leather like the design on a flag.
“Mr. Wills, tell me what you did to these men.”
“The only thing I did was visit Miss Mathers. We’ve been friends. Sometimes, I work on her bikes.” Rufen’s men snickered. My face flushed.
Wills motioned with his chin at Rufen. “He wants to be rid of me because he wants her to himself.”
“Is that right, ma’am?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling Aubrey’s hands on me. His lips on mine.
“I can see why you’d be friends with her. What’re they going to do to you for it?”
“They’ll whip me and drag me behind their bikes, out into the range.”
The rider stared into Rufen’s gun without fear. As if striking the hammer on the brass end of the shell lurking deep in the barrel wouldn’t explode the powder and drive the lead forth and directly into his chest.
“Sons of Thunder. You know what that means, brother Rufen?”
A light breeze rustled the rangeland, adding a soft sigh to the scene. The two men stared, the one backed up by his eight leather clad companions, the other backed by the sign on his jacket and the long object hanging from his belt.
sixteen
Rufen raised his gun and pointed his trigger finger at the clouds. Then, he slowly put his piece back into his belt holster. He spun around and pounced on his bike, grabbing the heavy chain binding Aubrey Wills. Rufen looped the links around the bar arching behind his bike’s saddle.
“Let’s ride, ‘Walkers,” he shouted.
I reached my hand to the stranger, “You can’t let them…”
“You want me to stop them?”
“Yes. Please make them stop.” My spine stiffened. Rufen might come back
and whip me for saying this, but I couldn’t let them drag Aubrey to his certain injury, if not death.
“Save him, he’s my friend.”
“You stupid bitch!” Rufen showed his teeth and his eyes closed to slits. “This hero won’t stick around, but I will.”
“Leave him.”
The rider in black, the man with the Sons of Thunder jacket, grabbed the object in his belt and pulled it partway free. Shards of light burst from the blade when the sun’s beams broke on the textured surface. I brought my hand up to shade my eyes.
“Don’t mess with us, man. We don’t play nice with strangers,” Rufen blustered.
“Drop that chain. Leave the boy here,” Jack said in a flat voice.
“I don’t care that you bought a pretty jacket. You might be a Son, or you might just be some vacationing suit playing with big boy toys. I got eight riders. Our guns will tear you full of holes. What you got there, a pantry knife?” Rufen laughed. “Look out boys; he brought a sword to a gunfight.”
“I get what you and your colony are, Rufen. This bat slicer is the best thing for your kind”
I gasped. Jack knows the Sunwalkers are much more than a motorcycle club. Calling them a colony was a high insult. My shoulders tightened, expecting guns to be drawn and bullets to fly.
“Who the fuck are you?” Johnny burst.
Vampires don’t really turn into bats. They do shift from human when they turn, growing long fangs and emitting a powerful hypnotic glamour that turns regular humans into willing slaves. The old ones can jump high, like where the crows fly high, which gave rise to the idea that blood drinkers grow bat wings. Vampires hate the legend and Rufen told me the story was started by the werewolves as payback for all the dog jokes.
“Norman. Jack Norman.” He pulled the blade all the way free from the scabbard. Intricate carvings decorated the sparkling metal length. Blocky wolves intertwined with lightning bolts ran along the blade.
Johnny let out an extended hiss ending with, “shit.”
Hand gripping his gun, Rufen stood there a long moment eying the blade shining in the sun. “He’s what I warned you about, Jeslie. A werewolf. He’s here because you can breed with him.”
Rufen looked genuinely sad, but a thrill ran through me. Werewolf. Like young Aubrey, but I hoped Jack was much more powerful. An alpha wolf. Rufen warned me about them.
“You may meet a beast who walks like a man, but turns into a wild wolf. Beware of them, Jeslie, they have power to rival a Sunwalker, but they are dogs with no control.” His voice had shaken when he spoke.
Rufen fingered the stocks of his pistol.
“A sordid tale comes with your name, Norman.”
The story’s convoluted and the narrator unreliable, but I’ll relate what I’ve been told. Thousands of years ago dire wolves owned the northlands. Differing from wild wolves of today, the creatures loomed pony-size. Most importantly, they possessed human-level intelligence.
With a language, and a culture.
But around the time Christ was born, men with iron arrows hunted the shaggy beasts until their numbers dwindled to a few hundred. They grew too big to hide and they bred too slowly. Their huge paws excellent for running down prey had no thumbs and could not fashion a spear. Or a bow.
A great dire wolf named Wotan noticed something while hunting one night: a pale being who hypnotized a human warrior and then sucked out all the man’s blood.
seventeen
The human warrior belonged to Wotan. He’d been stalking the lost Viking for hours, hunger pangs shooting through the dire wolf’s belly. The humans killed the mammoth, they killed the bear, and they killed the moose, leaving nothing but scrawny reindeer and oily seals. His natural prey’s scarcity had reduced Wotan to hunting men and the pale being stole his intended meal. Raging, Wotan leapt from cover and growled, fangs dripping on the snow. The strange creature tried hypnotic magic on Wotan, but could not change the wolf’s killing mood. Realizing his glamour had no effect on the wolf, the pale being hissed, displayed long, cat-like fangs and jumped at Wotan’s neck.
After a short and vicious fight, Wotan ate the blood drinker. The vampire’s disease, when mixed with dire wolf blood, created werewolves. The northmen called them wyrd - the ones who turn. Shifters. Intelligent creatures who morphed from wolf to human. The dire wolves adapted, moving into human towns. Blending in. But unlike vampires, the wyrd could not make new werewolves and could not infect humans with the disease. Instead, they reproduce by breeding with humans.
Certain humans. Humans like me. A source of eternal conflict being that the vampire desired genes like mine too. I possessed immunity. A vampire could bite me and I wouldn’t change. But once bitten, I could have vampire children. And those children would be able to view the daylight without being consumed. Sunwalkers. They became blood drinker leaders because vampires who could walk in the day dominated those who were constrained to the night. This unhappy accident meant both vampires and werewolves sought women with my genetic code for mates.
Lucky me.
“History’s what gets told by the survivors, brother Rufen.”
Jack Norman raised his eyebrows.
Daring Rufen to draw.
Instead, Rufen pulled the chain attached to Aubrey Wills off his bike and dropped it to the ground.
“Our history from this day onward is war and maybe tomorrow, next month, maybe ten years from now a Sunwalker will cut that jacket from your headless corpse.”
Several of Rufen’s Sunwalkers were my distant cousins, or were sons of other women like me. They ruled the vampires of Brecklan, and Rufen ruled them.
Rufen settled on his bike and turned his key. The big twin piston motor fired to life, the sound echoing off the hills. He spun his tire and then sped away leaving a dusty rooster tail marking the air.
My mouth dropped open and lucky the day was too dry for many flies to be around, or I would have scored myself a mouthful.
Jack Norman ruled Josiah Rufen.
Johnny stared at my savior, the rider I conjured from the shimmering desert air, then brought his own bike to life and raised his arm with his finger up, spinning in a circle.
The other riders followed suit and the whole gang disappeared over the horizon leaving a yellow dust cloud and throbbing engine sounds bouncing back and forth off the red shouldered hills.
eighteen
Aubrey stood, his torn clothes showing muscles rippling underneath. The chains wrapped around him clanked.
“If you’ll help me out of these, I’ll be going.”
I rushed to him, “No, Aubrey, stay. You need to recover your strength.” My voice lacked conviction. Aubrey was a nice boy, but the stranger in black, the man with the sword, he was now the one I wanted to stay. My infection pulled me toward his dominance.
Sweet Aubrey didn’t deserve to see me throw myself at Jack Norman.
Aubrey kissed my forehead. “The time we had was fun. But, I can’t abide bringing suffering to you. Rufen and his men will be back, and this time you will be able to say Aubrey Wills disappeared into the hills.”
He brushed dirt from his ripped jeans. “You won’t have to cover for me when I’m lying drunk under the willows. No, I’m going to spend some time camping on yonder ridges. Get some hunting in.”
Grabbing Aubrey’s chains, I tried to remove them, but they had been pad-locked in a cross behind his back.
“Besides, I can see how you look at Mr. Viking.” Aubrey nodded toward where Jack Norton pulled something from the other side of his bike.
“I’m not—,” I stopped herself. I didn’t want to lie to Aubrey. I did want to get to know Jack Norman better.
“I need to find something to get this lock loose.” I hoped Aubrey would miss the flush coloring my cheeks.
“This will do it,” the rider held a couple round metal pieces, each several inches long, thin and flat. One lay mostly straight, the other ended in a hook.
“You can pick it?”
Th
e stranger moved to where I held the chains behind Aubrey. Jack inserted both rods into the keyhole. With a smooth flip, he jerked the second piece out.
nineteen
The lock popped open. The stranger’s nearness made my heart race.
Aubrey shook the chains off and held out his hand in thanks.
Norman pocketed the picks and shook the boy’s hand.
“Take the Sportster, it’s on off-road tires. Good for the trails up there,” I said. After all the poor boy’s been through for me, giving him a motorcycle was the least I could do.
“No way Jeslie, that’s your father’s ride.”
“Don’t trouble yourself. He had plenty of bikes and that one’s just been waiting for a new rider. There’s a camp pack with food, water, and all that in the garage.” My voice broke in my eagerness for Aubrey to be safe and gone.
A muscle quivered at his jaw.
“Thanks. I’ll disappear until Rufen’s found some other neck to suck.”
Aubrey hitched his pants and nodded at Jack Norman.
“Or he’s found his last one.”
“Keep it vertical,” Jack said, slapping Aubrey’s back.
Aubrey limped toward the garage.
I turned to Jack. “You still need some gas. Let me get it.”
My eyes took in his powerful presence. Time to see if my intuition lied. “You change. You’re like them, not really human.”
“Not like them. But I can turn into something else.” Jack’s mouth twisted, wryly.
“And you…can’t,” his eyes that had been caged hard now gazed softly at me.
“You can say it. Rufen’s made what I am plain. I’m a body to breed sunwalkers.” I dropped my eyes, “And I’m a bridge between human and wolf.”
Blowing in the wind, a wisp of my hair covered my face. Jack caught it and tucked it behind my ear.
“Jeslie Mathers, the first thing you are is a beautiful woman I drove a thousand miles to meet.”