by Lila Bowen
The curtain shoved aside, and there they were: Sam, Winifred, Earl. A cold shudder shot up Rhett’s spine.
“I asked if you meant any harm.”
Buck smiled grandly, leaned over, and crooked a finger to call him closer. “Now, Rhett. Why on earth would I mean anyone harm? I told you. This is my town. My land. I just want to ensure its ongoing prosperity, and I reckon your crew doesn’t want trouble. Why, neither do I. Now sit. All of you.”
There were four empty chairs around the table, and sit they did, almost as if they had no choice.
“Everything okay, Rhett?” Sam asked, looking all worried.
“I don’t rightly,” Rhett admitted.
“Oh, everything’s fine,” Earl said, already drunk as a damn skunk. “I like this lad fine. Reminds me of home. Just the faintest hint of an accent there. D’ye hear it? Where you from, me fine sir?”
Buck cocked his head at Earl and gave him a grin, almost fondly. “Oh, I’m from everywhere, but the green hills of Ireland do hold a special place in my heart.”
Winifred was very still, her cheeks sucked in and her eyes dark. “Familiar,” was all she said.
“Lay it out for us, Mr. Greenwood,” Rhett said. “This smoke’s giving me a headache and an itchy trigger finger, both.”
“Please, call me Buck. And enjoy your stay. It’s rude to reject food and drink, you know.” Someone slid a tray onto the table, a dark green bottle with no label and five shot glasses. While Rhett was staring at the sticky residue in the bottom of the cups, another tray shoved in from shadowy hands, this one laden with white wheels of cheese and porcelain bowls of sugar-slick peaches and pears and a plate of dainty little cakes like Rhett had only ever seen in the display window of Gloomy Bluebird’s general store at Christmastime. Fancy food. Expensive food. An open jar of golden honey held glistening honeycomb, the whole thing laid out pretty as a picture, surrounded by loose flowers and glossy leaves of a deep green Rhett had never seen before in a Durango vegetable.
Buck poured sloppy shots of deep red liquor and showed his goodwill by closing his eyes, selecting a shot glass at random, and gulping it down.
“Eat. Drink. Take your comfort before we determine the toll. You folks look parched. You don’t want to insult my hospitality.”
“Hospitality is indeed sacred,” Earl quickly agreed, gladly toasting Buck with his drink.
Rhett was disgusted to see the wee Irishman cramming his mouth with a fat slab of cheese slathered in honey, which dripped down his chin. Earl’s shot was already gone, and Buck refilled the glass before Earl was done chewing. Glancing at Winifred, Rhett tried to make his eye say that all of this seemed very goddamn foolish. Winifred must’ve understood at least part of the look, as her mouth turned down at the corners, but she shrugged and drank her shot with a manly surety that Rhett had not expected from her.
“We must,” she murmured, licking her lips.
“Well, then. If we must,” Sam said, sounding uncertain, but his shot disappeared, too.
“You now, Mr. Walker,” Buck urged, his grin too cunning for Rhett’s taste.
Rhett felt like a wild horse, cornered and offered grain, knowing that the bucket meant capture but unable to back any farther away without fetching up against the fence.
“If we must,” he echoed.
The sweet liquid burned on its way down, floating immediately to his head with a pleasant sort of dreaminess helped along by the smoke. Last time Rhett had gotten drunk, it had been to forget what had nearly happened at the hands of Scorpion and his Lobos. The time before that had been his first introduction to alcohol, and he’d been stuffed with happiness to be counted among the cowpokes of the Double TK, at least until he’d seen the red eyes of the saloon’s vamp whores sitting on the laps of his friends.
Now, this time, it was different. The liquor hit his blood harder, thicker, almost demanding in its urgency. He needed more, which was fine, as his glass had already been refilled. A powerful hunger rose up in his wildly flipping stomach, and he caught a slippery peach slice and shoved it into his mouth, licking his fingers clean.
When he looked up, Sam was watching him with a strangely eager look.
“Have some more peaches, Rhett,” he said, voice husky. “They suit you.”
Rhett suddenly wanted more peaches with an almighty yearning, but he wasn’t so drunk that he’d forgotten what few manners he had. Looking to Buck to judge if another peach would be too much, he found the man splayed over his chair, one high-booted leg thrown over the arm, his eyes heavy-lidded and his smug, contented grin on the verge of perversion.
“Go on,” he urged. “Eat, if it pleases you.” His lips curled. “Eat and drink and honor me.”
Rhett’s fingers slished in the juice, hunting for a peach, his eye pinned to Sam. The liquor emboldened him enough to ask, “You hungry, Sam?” Leaning forward, he held out the piece of sweet fruit on two fingers.
“I reckon I’m powerful hungry, Rhett,” Sam answered.
Taking a deep breath, his blue eyes all soft and dark at once, Sam reached for Rhett’s hand, grasping it at the wrist with one hand and cupping the fingers gently with the other. Rhett trembled as Sam drew his hand closer and closer to those warm, slightly open lips, finally letting his tongue caress the sugared palm as he sucked the peach into his own mouth and licked the juice off Rhett’s fingers.
Rhett let out a shuddering breath and whispered, “Hot damn, other Hennessy.”
Sam leaned forward and licked his lips, and Rhett felt a rush of warmth in his belly, but the good kind. A light laugh drew his attention to his left, where Winifred had let her serape fall to the ground…and her shirt fall off her shoulder. Earl held out a shot glass, which the girl took with a wicked grin, twining her arm around Earl’s as they drank their liquor together, their faces flushed and their eyes alight.
“You’ve a little honey, me girl,” Earl said, his accent looser than usual. “Just here.” He cupped her face with one hand, running a thumb almost over her lips. Much to Rhett’s surprise, the girl leaned into Earl’s touch, her tongue darting out to lick the honey away.
“Mine,” she said brazenly. “A girl’s honey isn’t to be taken lightly.”
A hand on his knee brought Rhett back to his own situation. Sam’s chair was closer, and he held out a slice of peach. “Your turn,” he said, all breathy.
Rhett’s eye darted to Buck, and for a moment, last night’s dream and today’s reality merged. Buck had a stag’s face, massive antlers branching overhead, tangled with bits of metal and ribbon over his natty black suit. He loomed large, powerful, dangerous, shadowy, his eyes black and as endless as the night, urging Rhett on like a heartbeat. A fire danced between them, and the blond girl in the night shift sat at Buck’s feet, her white arms curled around his leg and her upcast eyes adoring. A fawn’s skin was draped over her back, a piece of green vine twined around her arm. Buck’s hand was on her head, patting her like a fine hunting dog. Rhett shook his head, and the room refocused into wood boards and velvet curtains and sickly sweet smoke. Figures writhed in the corners, but that was just the way of whores and men, wasn’t it?
“Rhett?”
The peach brushed his lips, and Rhett gave in to it, swallowing the bit of fruit with a moan and sucking the juice from Sam’s fingers. A clatter to the left was followed by a moan and panting. He released Sam’s fingers and turned his head to find Winifred sitting in Earl’s lap, front to front, their clothes asunder and Winifred’s eyes closed, her mouth open and yowling as she rode him like an ungentled bronc. Sam’s hand crept up Rhett’s thigh, calling him back.
“Do you like peaches?” Sam asked.
“I do now.”
“I wonder how’d they’d taste…”
Sam trailed off, caught another peach in the dish, and rubbed it over Rhett’s lips, following the sticky fruit with his tongue. Soon they were kissing, and it was like peaches and honey and liquor but better, hot and wet and sweet beyond compare, tongues
sliding and teeth nibbling and hands roaming.
“What’s happening, Sam?” Rhett asked wonderingly, glad and scared all at once.
His stomach was flopping all over the place, his head swimming, his heart singing, his blood thrumming, his nethers begging.
“I don’t rightly know, Rhett, but I like it.”
Sam’s hands were under his shirt now, counting his ribs and the knobs of his spine and hunting down the back of his britches, and Lord help him, but his hands were under Sam’s shirt, and then they fell down, rolling in the grass, and they were on a soft, dark bearskin in front of a fire, and everything was slick and red, and the walls were a deep green forest and the lamps were stars, and Sam touched him in a place where he’d never wanted to be touched before but now couldn’t stop moaning for.
“Sam, I don’t want…that place…”
“Then where? Tell me.”
Sam’s hands pulled away, but Rhett pulled them back, placed them carefully on his waist. “I don’t know what I want. But I want it. By the gods, I want it.”
“I think I know what to do, Rhett.” Sam’s eyes were soft and starving and dark indigo, wide as the sky, his hands open and cupping and warm. “There’s one place where all bodies are the same, and I know what to do with that.”
“Then do it, Sam. Goddamn. Do it.”
And Sam did. And it was mighty fine for all involved.
Chapter
9
Rhett Walker woke up at dawn covered in three things: blood, fur, and the tangled, lanky limbs of Samuel Hennessy. He blinked through stuck-together eyelashes and slid out from under Sam. He was nekkid as a baby and slicked all over with God knew what. Rubbing his eye, he stood to figure out what the hell was going on.
What they lay on was a buffalo coat barely altered from when the beast had worn it. To one side were the remains of a fire, the dirt all around stamped with the prints of bare feet and cloven hooves. On the other side of the embers was a familiar serape. Winifred and Earl, likewise nekkid and messy, sprawled there, senseless. Those two weren’t quite as bloody, but that didn’t mean they were clean, neither. The funk of rutting and goats rode the air, coupled with the delicious and sickening scent of fresh blood and roasted meat. Slicked-up bones were scattered about, the pork mostly gnawed off.
The whole scene was outside of town in the grove Rhett had noticed from the air. The trees sagged with ripe apples and pears and peaches that glistened like paste jewels in the morning sun. Dewdrops licked the spiderwebs, and a fresh breeze played through glossy leaves. The grass here was strangely soft and bright green, like a carpet. It was goddamn beautiful, all told, and yet Rhett’s stomach turned with disgust and wrongness.
For once, that wobbling wasn’t about a monster. Whatever he’d been, Buck was gone.
What had happened here last night…it hadn’t been natural.
“Figured it out yet?”
Rhett’s hands jerked over his groin and chest as his head snapped around to glare at Dan, who was wearing all his damn clothes and not in any way impeded by fluids and embarrassment and muck. He had his typically amused grin, and yet his eyes were hard and angry. He was sitting on a rock, a pile of clothes at his feet. Shaking his head in disgust, he tossed Rhett his dirty shirt and muttered, “You’ll want to bathe first. You reek, man.”
Holding the shirt over his front, Rhett looked around the grove and headed for the burbling creek. With his back to his sleeping friends, he waded into the cold water and quickly dashed it all over himself. It was freezing, but it felt good. Burned, almost. He had to scrub in some places, so thick was the gore that had crusted into hair and flesh. His posterior was tender, and his face flushed with confusion as he probed the area in question and tried to recall what exactly had transpired.
Funny, how it had seemed perfectly reasonable at the time and yet now, he was consumed by shame. Rhett didn’t have great faith in shame, nor did he want it attached to his feelings about Samuel Hennessy. Shame seemed like somebody else telling you what to do with your body, and Rhett didn’t reckon he’d let other folks decide how he was going to feel. So maybe it wasn’t the act that brought the shame so much as the situation and the fact that he didn’t remember much about it. As he tossed water over his shorn hair and scrubbed his face clean, he looked to where Sam still lay under the buffalo rug, limp and sprawled out, innocent as a puppy.
Ye gods, please don’t let Sam feel shame about it, he thought. If there’s a burden, let it be mine. What I got’s already so heavy I probably won’t notice the addition at all.
“He wouldn’t want you to feel sorry,” Dan offered, and Rhett realized he’d been speaking out loud, and that Dan had snuck up with the rest of his clothes while he stood in the middle of the damn creek, rubbing his face over and over again like a goddamn raccoon.
Dan held out Rhett’s chest wrap, and Rhett turned his back and secured his useless anatomy before stepping into his pants. Once his slick-wet shirt was on, he felt slightly more ready to ask, “He who?”
“The horned god.”
“I don’t see any gods, Dan. Just a bunch of fools and one haughty coyote.”
Dan shook his head like Rhett was a willfully stupid child. “Come now, Rhett. You know that what happened last night was by design. The signs are everywhere. Have you never met a god?”
Rhett stepped into his boots and slapped on his hat. “Not that I know of. Do they wear signs? Badges, maybe?” He flicked his own badge, glad to find it was still there.
“If you know what to look for.” Dan pointed as he spoke. “A grove under the stars. Cloven hoofprints. Honey. Fruit. Strong drink. A fire. Sexual congress. A sacrifice.”
Rhett swallowed hard, tasting blood. “A sacrifice?”
“That buffalo skin was somebody’s coat. It’s not freshly made, but those bones are.”
Closing his eye, Rhett poked around his shattered memory for the truth of what Dan was telling him. Last man he’d seen wearing a big buffalo coat was the doctor who’d refused treatment to Winifred and called Rhett himself by some less than savory slurs. He’d only seen the man once, and yet…
The girl in white had been there, hadn’t she? She’d led the doctor out of the dark and toward the fire, her tiny fingers dug into the thick wool of his buffalo coat, dragging him along unwillingly.
“Who’s hurt?” the doc had growled uneasily. “I got drinking to do.”
“So drink here,” Buck had said, sitting cross-legged behind the flames. “I’ll want you plenty wet for what’s coming.”
Then everything went into a blur. Frightened eyes, so wide, fingers tearing into flesh and pulling off strips like barn siding in a windstorm. Incisors on bones, the sweet lap of marrow, hands on thighs and lips on lips and laughing teeth. The buffalo coat, laid down lovingly, Rhett’s cheek pressed into the pile as he gritted his teeth and Sam behind him…Sam…
“Oh, hellfire,” Rhett spat, opening his eye and shaking his head.
“You remember now?”
“Piss off, Coyote Dan.”
Rhett kneeled by the stream and cupped fresh cold water into his mouth, swishing it and spitting it out tinged rusty red. He drank down the next handful, loving the burn down his throat.
“It’s not your fault, Rhett. Nor anyone’s. The gods have certain demands, and if you don’t meet them, you meet your end. He’s not the first god to demand his toll, to crave blood, and he won’t be the last.”
Standing with a splash, Rhett reached for his gun belt. “Then let’s kill him. That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it, Dan? To kill what needs to die.”
“Gods can’t die, Rhett. You’ve just got to learn to give them a wide berth.”
“Is that why you left last night? Is that why you didn’t go into town with us?’
Dan shook his head. “No. That was just dumb luck.”
“Dumb’s right, for sure. So you’re saying I can’t kill this Buck Greenwood?”
“The only thing that can kill a god is when
no one’s left to worship him.”
“Then why’d my destiny, or the Shadow, or whatever the hell it is, drag me out here?”
Dan’s shrug was guileless. “I don’t presume to know the way of gods, and I barely understand the Shadow, most of the time.”
Rhett snorted to indicate that Dan presumed quite a bit, most of the time.
Walking to a tree, Dan plucked a ruby-red apple and threw it to Rhett. “Here’s the thing, Rhett. Everything has a cost. You live in a tribe, you pull your weight. You live in a town, you do your job. You live on a farm, you sweat into the soil. You want something, you suffer for it. Living is not free. Life demands sacrifice. Where gods go, they bring prosperity. Look at this town. Big, safe, no one starving to death, no plague, no horses falling over from bad water. Bite into that apple and tell me it isn’t sweet. Folks who live under the protection of gods know they’ll be called to do their part, to pay their dues, and they go willingly. For many, it’s preferable to politics and government. Let’s just say that the tax here is a little different.”
“It was different for that doctor in the buffalo coat.”
Dan’s grin was wry and sad. “If the god claimed him, he did something to deserve it.”
“Says who?”
“Says the god.”
Rhett’s jaw worked in consternation before he gave in and bit into the apple. Sweetness flooded his mouth, juice dripping down his chin. It reminded him of something from last night, but he didn’t mind as much now. For a yappy bastard, Coyote Dan sometimes made sense, and his explanation appealed to Rhett, in part because it excused his mixed reaction to last night. It wasn’t natural, but…it was natural, wasn’t it? It was just that city folks didn’t approve of it, done in full light. Well, and what if Rhett would rather pay with his body than with coin? There was nothing wrong with what had passed between Sam and him last night—he knew that much, bone deep. And if it were to happen again without a great horned fool in a black coat watching, it would be all the sweeter.