by David Boop
“She was already dead,” Will protested. All eyes turned to him.
“Not to me. None of them were. We all make our homes in our corners of hell. Abaddon was ours. We had dreams once, of settling the West, until an Apache raid cut them short. Only my power saved me. I couldn’t let the dream die.”
“So you what? Raised them from the dead?” Bose slowly pieced the story together. The man glanced at him with only a fraction of his intense scorn. Hatred emanated from him like waves of heat from desert sands. The death of a child could drive any man insane, twisting him so that any straw to stem the pain was grasped.
“Her death broke my spell that held us together. No matter where they were. All my friends, my family, returned to the grave.” The desert judge spoke softly, with an almost defeated tone.
“You’ll know my torment.” Almost unconsciously, the wizened creature touched the small pouch dangling from his neck. “You’ll watch all you love die.”
Mr. Grimes aimed his Winchester at the man, but before he could fire, the man let loose a soul-piercing scream. The men covered their ears, not that it helped. Bose caught sight of movement from the corner of his eye.
The steers.
The stink of flesh rotting from their bones rose to a near physical pitch. Most of the bodies huddled near one another, as if knowing that death approached, seeking the comfort of one another in their last moments. The corpses of the fallen steers formed a burial mound of sorts, yet something stirred in the pile. Bones drew to one another like magnetized bits, not caring how they lined up. Flesh knitted together, bits stitched from each steer melting into one another, forming a patchwork quilt of rotted skin over the skeletal creature. A looming longhorn head, larger than the skull of any single steer, topped the monstrosity. It opened its maw, echoing the ear-bleeding shriek of its master.
Moving with terrifying speed, it attacked the Circle T boys. Mr. Grimes stepped between the creature and Will, leaving his men to fend for themselves. It tore into them, trampling some, scattering the rest with its thunderous hooves. Lowering its head, the beast looked on to Henry, who stood his ground. Henry fumbled with his metal flask, downing a quick swig before welcoming the steer’s gouging horns with a grimace of near relief. The horns pierced him in his belly and with a sharp upthrust, ripped him to the top of his ribcage. His insides spilled out while he still stood.
“Dear God,” Mr. Grimes muttered, watching the scene.
“There is no God. Not for you. Not for me.” Fine lines radiated from the desert judge’s dark eyes, a filigree of sun, wind, and hard living. Hate convoluted his brain so deep, his eyes seemed to withdraw in shame. Cruelty etched around his mouth when he turned toward Will Grimes. “Your boy. Such enormous vitality he possesses. It will be a pleasure to drain him.”
“Pa?” Will suddenly looked every bit of his teenage years.
Bradford Grimes stared at his son, the word “no” formed on his lips.
“You’ve had your fill of blood.” Bose loosened the thong holding his gun in place. “Why not leave them with what they’ve seen. They’ve paid enough.”
The desert judge turned to him. “True, this won’t relieve my soul. The burdens that scar it aren’t so easily erased, but it will make them, make her, rest a mite easier.”
“Can’t say that what either of them did was right,” Bose said. “But Mr. Grimes here still owes me for a few days.”
The man waved his broken-nailed hands, summoning the creature. The monster turned, chewing the broken body of Dirk with languid disinterest. Dirk’s shirt exploded in red, slickening the creatures flank. It spat him out with a snort and charged toward Bose. Like a boxer, he moved easy on his feet and let his hand swing to the gun butt, cocking the gun as he grasped it. The tip of his finger squeezed the trigger, a tuneless hum on his lips. Bullets snarled and snapped, chipping rocks like jagged teeth.
The bullets met something solid in the swirling shadows that formed the chest of the desert judge. The man dropped to his knees and collapsed forward. Bose moved in to examine him. The man’s legs spasmed. His arms jerked, regaining life by inches. Beginning to push himself up, the tiny sack dangled by leather thongs from his neck. On instinct, Bose snatched the bag. The desert judge wailed as Bose poured out its contents. Bits of burnt bone, far too small to be an adult, fell to the earth. A glint of metal landed in the ash. A locket fell open, revealing the picture of a young girl. Not quite on his knees, the judge reached toward the locket. All strength fled him and he collapsed.
“Looks like I owe you my life again.” Mr. Grimes nudged the body with the tip of his boots.
“You’re many things, but you’re no welsher.” Bose turned to Mr. Grimes and held out his hand. Without any words, Mr. Grimes counted out Bose’s owed pay. Bose envied the heroes of dime novels, how their exaggerated exploits tickled the fancy of the public. Knowing that no one would tell his tale, his restless heart grew ready to hit the trail. He’d heard that some Exodusters traveled toward Cascade, Kansas. That sounded like it might be a fine town to spend some money.
So he rode.
DRY GULCH DRAGON
SARAH A. HOYT
Would you let your sister marry a dragon? The words ran through Jack Hemming’s mind, over and over. As the train rocked beneath him, left and right, clackety clack, the question echoed as though the sounds of the train itself were asking it, Would you let your sister marry a dragon?
He’d never heard the words spoken. He had read it in half a dozen letters from Dry Gulch. It was amazing, he reflected as he looked out a window made amber by the smoke from the coal-fired engine, at an endless expanse of prairie flecked with the occasional herd of buffalo. It could knock you dead with surprise how many people with no interest in either words, or his own private life, had found they needed to write to him, as he was in Chicago, winding up his late uncle’s estate, to tell him that Maisie was walking out with Deep Mine Pete.
The stable keeper had written him, and Ted who ran the saloon, and Jim who kept cattle in the scrubby lands over the river.
And the thing was, Jack didn’t know what to answer. He knew Deep Mine Pete and liked him, in the way he could be said to like anyone he’d never had much dealing with. Deep Mine Pete was a good man, or would be if he were a man. In his human form he was taller than most and thinner than most, and was none too bad with a gun, but nothing out of the way. In his dragon form—well, he hauled mine cars from the Silver Dollar mine. Which was, Jack reminded himself, an honorable job, if menial. And he took gold shipments on over to Denver, on the wing, avoiding bandits. None of it paid a lot, but he lived decently, in a tidy little cabin.
People said that Pete scoured the hills and the prairies at night and ate buffalo raw or perhaps alive, and if he was not nearby and they felt brave, they would add to the tale that he also ate miners, raw, if he could catch them.
And if a damn fool disappeared while panning for gold, or fell down some gorge while looking for nuggets, people in town whispered that Pete looked well fed and gave Pete the glare.
Jack couldn’t hold with that. There was no proof, and no reason to suspect Pete of anything untoward. He had treated Pete as he treated everyone else. Pete behaved like a man of honor, and he got treated like a man of honor. And that was why people had taken such delight in writing to Jack about Maisie. Because they thought he’d been too soft on Pete and was now reaping what he’d sowed.
But to Jack the question wasn’t “Would you let your sister marry a dragon?” The question was “What kind of man takes advantage of another man’s absence to court his sister without chaperonage?” And “Had anything else gone on than walking out together?” Maisie was out there, day in, day out in that log cabin on the mountain, and Jack had been away for a month.
A lot of things went on in a month.
Would he let his sister marry a dragon? Well, he might at that, if he didn’t have to shoot him for a faithless varmint first.
* * *
Jack arrived at D
ry Gulch late, and was grateful for the silent streets, the dark houses. All he needed was to have to dodge a committee of concerned citizens, each one informing him of goings-on in his absence, each one demanding to know what he was going to do about it.
Part of it, he thought, was that they were bored. Most people who moved to Dry Gulch were looking to escape and maybe for adventure. People didn’t live on the edge of the magical lands, pushing humans into territory that had been held, time out of mind, by the tribes of magic workers who had escaped from Europe as humans took it over, without having a taste for the unexpected. And there hadn’t been a robbery or a riot or even a duel since Six-Shooter Malcolm had taken out the water wizard three years ago.
So he was glad of the silence and the darkness, as he walked, carrying his valise, past rows of houses where everything was shuttered and the only noise was the occasional barking of a dog or whinney of a horse.
The saloon was open and well lit, but even there the noise of conversations and arguments was so muted you could hear the forlorn tinkling of the piano playing “Clementine.”
And further on, as he walked past Madame Madeleine’s Maison of Mechanical Pleasures, that was lit too, and he could hear the sound of a girl being wound up for yet another customer.
Nothing disturbed him as he took the path up the cliff and around the sacred grove—where fairy lights shone and there was a weird sound like a harp played so high the ear could barely catch it—and then on, past the turn in the mountain road, to his cabin.
And right there, he knew something was wrong, because the cabin was dark, and it shouldn’t be dark. Maisie didn’t even like to have the oil lamp unlit while she slept. It wasn’t so much that she was afraid of the dark, as that she said it felt lonesome. Like she was the last person left on Earth. He’d had to remonstrate with her about the danger of fire often and again, before she’d snuff off the wick.
Getting closer to the cabin, he found more causes for worry. Before he witnessed the door beating forlornly in the wind, he heard it, and when he entered the cabin, he heard things scurrying out—wild creatures who must have come in while the cabin was opened and untenanted. Maisie would never leave the cabin open.
“Maisie,” he called to the cold dark, knowing full well there would be no answer. And then again “Maisie!”
Wind blew through the windows, too, where no one had bothered to fasten the shutters, and he had to find his way to the fireplace by touch, tripping over things on the floor, which told him that the whole inside of the cabin had been overturned, as though by a small, vicious, indoor tornado. He couldn’t find the oil lamp, at first, and since the fireplace mantel was curiously denuded, he feared it had been overturned, but then his hand grasped its rounded metallic belly, and he felt upward for the hurricane glass. He set it aside, by touch, and felt around for the box of matches, which he found on the point of falling from the mantel.
Striking a match against the rough brick seemed to produce almost too bright a light after the total darkness. Jack struck it to the wick of the oil lamp, and as that flared up, it was bright as a mini-sun to his unaccustomed eyes. He blinked until he could see more clearly, then put the hurricane glass back on and looked around.
The cabin had been turned upside down, just as he’d expected.
In the corner, near the Franklin stove, which Maisie called the kitchen, though it was just part of the same great room, the table had been overturned, the flour bin had been burst as though by a powerful kick. There was a frying pan on the floor in a puddle of oil and what looked like the remains of eggs and bacon.
On the other side of the room, the bed that Jack used at night had also been inverted. He blinked at it, because it hadn’t been turned wrong side up as though someone were searching for something, but more like someone had clutched the mattresses trying to hold on to them and had been dragged nonetheless. The mattress was half-off the box springs, and the bed clothes formed a trail toward the door. Part of the headboard was missing. It was an iron headboard, and the decorative finial that screwed into the pole was there on the right side but not on the left.
Jack picked up the oil lamp and carried it with him to the inner room. Maisie’s room. It was curiously neat, clean, as she kept it normally, her bed made with the multicolored quilt which was their only legacy from their mother, and her clothes hanging on the pegs on the wall. He squinted at them: night shift, and Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, which left Maisie in her everyday skirt and blouse. The final peg was taken up by her winter coat and her bonnet, which meant wherever she’d gone, it hadn’t been willingly because she’d never go out willingly without her bonnet.
“Oh hell,” said a male voice from the door. And then a wavering call, “Maisie?”
Jack jumped. Before he had himself in hand, he was by the fireplace, setting down his oil lamp, and it was a good thing his revolvers were in his valise, and that his Remington shotgun didn’t hang where it normally did, over the fireplace, because otherwise it would have been out and he would have—
He would have put a bullet in Deep Mine Pete’s head, as the dragon, in his human form, stood at the entrance, pale and disheveled, and looking like he’d been dragged through hell backward by his hair.
He had the time to say, “Hi, Jack, is Maisie—” before Jack was on him.
Now the truth is at that moment Jack would have taken on anyone, man, dragon or demon without the least bit of thought. He had his hand around Pete’s neck and was trying to lift him off his feet, against the frame of the door. He couldn’t, of course, because dragons even in their human form weighed as much as, well…a dragon, and dragons were heavy creatures which could only lift up and fly because they were magical creatures, too.
But what woke Jack from his fury, more than the fact that he couldn’t lift a full grown dragon, was that Deep Mine Pete wasn’t fighting. He wasn’t even defending himself. Instead, when Jack barked at him, “Where is my sister you son of a snake?” all the dragon did was blink his oddly amber-colored eyes, swallow hard—his Adam’s apple bobbing under Jack’s clutching hand—and say, “Oh no. You don’t know where she is either?”
It could have been dissembling, of course, but it didn’t feel like dissembling. It felt like the genuine thing, honest shock at Maisie’s absence.
Without taking his hand from around the dragon’s neck, though Jack was starting to suspect it really made no difference to the dragon, Jack swept the room with a grand gesture of his other hand. “As you see,” he said. “And she didn’t go willingly. I’m going to guess around breakfast this morning, from the spilled eggs and bacon.”
Pete shook his head. “No,” he said. “Couldn’t be this morning. They don’t come out while there’s sunlight.”
* * *
So Jack hadn’t shot Pete’s face off, mostly because he couldn’t get to his guns in time, but also because like everyone else he knew that normal bullets did nothing to shapeshifters, and he didn’t have any silver ones on hand since there had never been any trouble with lycanthropes in Colorado, not since the Kidd gang had been captured. But he had growled, “They? Who are they?” and if Pete had been a normal man would have bounced his head off the doorframe a time or two. Instead, his hand met the resistance of that more-than-mortal weight, and then Pete was removing his fingers from Pete’s neck, gently, and grasping him by the shoulders, not gently, and frog-marching him to the one chair still upright in the mess that had been the kitchen. He pushed Jack down on the chair and said, “Sit, and I’ll tell you what’s happening.”
Perhaps Jack was in shock, but it seemed to him no time at all before Pete had the table and the other chair upright too, and sat down on the other chair, facing him across the table.
“You thought that I wouldn’t let my sister marry a dragon,” Jack said. “So you kidnapped her and—” He heard the words leave his mouth before he realized how idiotic he sounded, even as Pete shook his head and said, “No, come on now, you are better than that. Why would I come lookin
g for her and be shocked not to find her if I’d taken her?”
“To…throw me off the scent?” Jack asked, but it sounded as flat as he felt.
“Why would I have a need to do that, if I had taken Maisie away? I could simply have flown her somewhere like Denver.”
“How do I know? How do I know how a dragon’s head works?” Jack asked, as the entire day in the train caught up with him, the bouncing and jostling of the third-class carriage, with its hard wood seats, the heat of the sun, and the cold as night descended and they climbed toward Denver.
Pete made a sound that in any other circumstances could be called a chuckle. “Oh, hell,” he said. “I don’t know how dragons think, either, only how I think, and though Maisie is the best gal I’ve met in centuries, I did not kidnap her. If time should come for…well, I can do things in the mode of the time like any other civilized creature.”
Before Jack could digest that in centuries, Pete said, “No, Maisie and I weren’t walking out together that way, or maybe we were, too, and just lying to ourselves, but what I’ve tried to do this last month is prepare her for…for the attack at summer solstice.”
“The what?”
“When the days are at their longest, before the year turns from waxing towards summer to waning towards winter,” Pete said, as though talking to a child. “You know, the longest day of the year. Today. The night when the dark elves dance in the sacred grove.” He looked at Jack, very earnestly, and it seemed to Jack his amber eyes flicked, like the moon changing aspect. “Every year for five years now, they take someone at the solstice. I know I usually get blamed for eating them, but I do not eat humans. And this year, I knew there weren’t any isolated trappers or prospectors around, but Maisie was here all alone, in this cabin. I knew they’d get her. I tried to prepare her. I thought I could defend her—”
Jack was on his feet, still blurry with fatigue and confusion, but as ready as he was going to be. “What do they do to the people they take at the solstice? Kill them?”