by Helena Maeve
A gray plume of smoke filled the air with the smell of charred meat and burning logs.
“Cattle rustlers,” one of the Riders yelled out. “Do we chase them, boss?”
“Get the animals together!” Halloran called.
From the corner of his eye, Asher saw him circle back.
“Asher.”
But Asher couldn’t look away from the fire. He tasted cinders on his tongue. He heard the screams of women still trying to salvage worthless trinkets. White nightgowns fluttered around flame-blistered legs, the fire licking at their fraying ends.
“Asher.” This time, Halloran pulled up alongside and took his arm. “I don’t have enough men. I need you to—”
“No. No, I can’t.” The bay gave a protesting whicker when Asher pulled him sharply back. They were five hundred yards from the farm, but the wind carried the heat and stench of the fire. Asher choked on it.
Halloran grabbed the reins from his hands. “You must.”
“I ain’t getting near that!”
“Nor should you. But if we don’t get those cows back, Ambrose’ll have our heads. And he ain’t gonna start with his own kind, you understand? Think of Charlie.”
Asher blinked. Charlie Wheeler. Charlie, who was Wesley’s friend, who herded cows and went all soft and pliant for Blackjack.
Charlie, who’d told Asher’s friends how to get him out.
“Don’t know where you got the idea I’m the guy to ride that river with,” Asher muttered, but Halloran’s threat had the desired effect. “Give me the fucking reins.”
Halloran dithered a moment before letting go. “We’re drivin’ them to Willowbranch. You still remember the way?”
Asher could hardly not. The last time he’d ridden these plains, the sky had been just as dark. Fear had choked him then too.
The other Riders had already split up to gather the herd before it fled any farther north. Asher took the south flank, putting his back to the fire. Cattle wailed as he drove the bay around them, blocking their exodus and steering them back toward the firelight. Feed supplies running so low, the cows weren’t very big, but they were as shy of brains as a terrapin was of feathers. They stumbled along ten paces one way only to turn sharply at the eleventh and have to be nudged back toward the rest of the herd.
Asher shouted and cursed until his throat ached. His hands began to sweat around the reins. The cold night gusts became a welcome balm. And, slowly, as the beasts were driven farther and farther from New Morning Farm, their frenzied attempts at flight diminished.
Willowbranch welcomed them with darkened windows and an empty yard. There would be no hay to soothe the cattle until the sun came up, but corralling them into a pen and closing the gate was triumph enough for one night.
His knees like rubber, Asher leaned against the gatepost to catch his breath. The sky had already begun to lighten to the east.
The night had come and gone.
“How many did we lose?” Halloran asked his men.
“Couple of cows,” said Maud. “Three calves.”
“Not as bad as it could’ve been,” Nyle offered.
His eyes hidden under the brim of his hat, Halloran nodded. He seemed satisfied with that tally.
But in the distance the farm still smoldered, black smoke rising from its ruined barn in purplish filaments. “What about the ranch hands?” Asher heard himself ask.
No one volunteered a number. That wasn’t as important a calculation. Humans, after all, were replaceable.
Asher found his bay on the other side of the pen, chewing indifferently at a clump of bunchgrass. It raised its head to acknowledge him, but otherwise seemed to find no reason to interrupt his meal.
Halloran’s approach didn’t provoke the same amount of interest.
“We headin’ back?” Asher guessed, his voice stripped of all emotion. There was no sense in doubting it. Whatever he did, Sargasso always reeled him back in again.
“Not yet.”
From a pocket in his waistcoat, Halloran produced a cigarette case and a box of matchsticks. He lit up in silence, shaking out the flame before Asher’s gaze could latch on to it.
“What happened to the stogies?”
“Ran out,” Halloran said on a smoke-filled breath. He held out the cigarette over the four feet between them, and Asher took it. “Answer’s two, by the way.”
“Two what?”
“Dead cowherds.”
Asher exhaled. “Charlie?”
“Don’t know yet, but I didn’t see Blackjack blow his stack, so…”
“Like he’d give a damn.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“By dumb humans stealing cattle in the middle of the night, sure. Not by one of you.”
Halloran slipped his large, cold hand around Asher’s and retrieved the cigarette. “Cattle rustlers don’t burn farms.”
“You’re the expert.”
The quip earned him a glare, the bright end of the cigarette illuminating Halloran’s brow. A month ago, backtalk would have earned Asher at least the threat of violence, if not its delivery. He wondered if it was the patchwork welded into his skin that put Halloran off.
Halloran exhaled another puff of smoke and tossed his cigarette into the dirt. “Come with me.”
“Why?” Asher shot back, already pushing away from the wooden fence to follow. He couldn’t seem to learn his lesson when it came to asking questions. He should’ve known by now that Halloran would treat him to the same silence he’d offered in leaving Sargasso. That he’d stalk into the flat wilderness surrounding Willowbranch with an indecipherable sense of purpose.
Trepidation still blossomed as Asher fell into step beside him, able to keep up with a vampire’s gait only because said vampire allowed it.
“On the shoot again, huh?” When he spoke at last, Halloran’s voice was an unnecessarily low whisper.
“No, I ain’t.” Denial was the easiest way to handle accusations that struck a little too close to home.
It made no difference. Halloran parked a foot on a scraggly piece of rock and abruptly ceased marching them into the unknown. “I need you to stop.”
“Or you’ll make me?”
Halloran shook his head. “I told you it wasn’t cattle rustlers.”
The conversational about-face seemed to come out of nowhere. Asher frowned, perplexed. “What’s that got to do with—?”
“Ambrose thinks we’re in the clear ’cause we took out Redemption.” Halloran blew out a breath. “He’s wrong.”
A chill shivered down Asher’s spine. Halloran didn’t need to talk in riddles to get his point across. If he was doing it at all—
Asher slanted a glance toward the farm. Candles and lamps had begun to glow like beacons in the windows. The other Riders must have made their way indoors. But walls didn’t mean they couldn’t eavesdrop on Halloran and Asher.
The whole town heard you two, Malachi had taunted. Per Halloran’s confirmation, it was probably true.
“It ain’t Moreau,” Asher heard himself say, equally hushed.
“We don’t know that.” Halloran cocked his head. “Do we?”
The creeping dawn deprived his ruddy face of the mysterious allure he carried so well at night. He looked a little too much like a man. Too much like someone Asher might have been sweet on, in another life.
In this one, there was no room for carrying torches.
“Yes, we do,” Asher murmured. A human might have struggled to hear him. A vampire knew no such impediment.
Halloran held his gaze for such a long time that Asher became acutely aware of every heartbeat throbbing in his neck. He shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have given even an inch. What was he thinking? Halloran had Ambrose’s ear. He was invited to eat at his table by Ambrose’s de facto successor.
A kernel of fear sprouted roots in Asher’s gut, but it was too late to swallow the words and no easy excuse presented itself for saying them.
At length, Hallo
ran straightened and tucked his thumbs into his pockets. “We’re gonna go for a walk…and you’re gonna tell me everything.”
It was the kind of order that didn’t brook opposition.
Asher nodded. He could do little else.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Recounted for a third party, the business of shooting a man was more sordid than its doing. Pamphlets warning border towns about the exploits of gunslingers and criminals made it sound like a fluke. Squeeze a trigger, watch a body fall. Add another cross to the tally.
Asher couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“It gets easier,” Halloran told him softly, once the tale had wound down and they were left with the ridge at their backs and the sun splashing their shadows onto the cracked dirt.
“Does it?” Asher pressed dry lips together. “Suppose I’ll never find out, now that you know… When do you plan on telling Ambrose?” Idle curiosity more so than genuine dread bid him ask.
Whether he had a week or a day left, it would make no difference. The die had already been cast.
“I ain’t.”
Maybe the die’s loaded.
“Killing a vampire’s against the law,” Asher pointed out. “’Specially for a human.”
Halloran shrugged. He’d tugged his gloves back on to protect his hands from the sun but that didn’t stop him scraping a flat stone over the blade of his shiv, deft strokes sharpening the blade. “Ain’t the first law you broke. Knowing you, it won’t be the last.”
Clemency was a rare animal in Sargasso. It very seldom knew a vampire master.
“You know they shoot dogs who bite their owners for a reason, right?”
“Idiots do,” Halloran agreed. “If you ask me, you’d have better luck training them to bite everyone else.”
Asher groped for something to say. A fierce denial would do to remind Halloran who he was talking to—not some malleable kid but one who’d been entertaining murderous thoughts since long before they met. One who despised not just Ambrose but all vampires.
In the end, he settled on squirming where he sat beside Halloran and training his gaze outward. The morning was shaping up to be bracing and dusty. The raised rock at their backs kept the worst of the autumnal gusts at bay, but Asher could taste the char on the wind. He knew that somewhere just outside his field of vision, New Morning Farm was meeting the sun as the valley’s latest ruin.
“You’re not gonna tell me about Octavian, are you?”
Halloran’s whetting aborted with a metallic twang. In the brief stretch it took him to speak, Asher considered the wisdom of importuning a vampire armed with a very sharp knife.
“You don’t need tellin’.”
So it’s true. Romero had confirmed her part in the assassination with her eyes. Halloran could afford to be slightly blunter about it.
“Thought you’d be relieved,” he went on, when Asher failed to respond. “As I recall, you two weren’t the best of friends.”
“Don’t mean I wanted him to die.”
Halloran glanced at him, the rear portion of his hat scraping against rock. “Doesn’t it?”
The incredulity in his voice recalled all the degradation Asher had endured at Octavian’s hand. All the nights he’d lain awake because his neck or wrist hurt too much to sleep. The shame of being mocked for enjoying the bite colored every memory a deep, putrid green.
“Doesn’t mean I wanted him to die by your hand,” Asher amended crossly. “There were other candidates. He hurt enough of us to fill every pew in church.”
“Huh.”
“What?” Asher snapped his head up, scowling. “You don’t believe me?”
“You still got some anger left in you. Thought it might have leaked with your blood…”
Asher cut his eyes away. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” As strange as it was for a vampire to commend a human for hating their kind. But that was Halloran all over, wasn’t it? An odd stick, if Asher had ever known a man worthy of the name.
A rustle of cloth telegraphed Halloran’s movements but Asher was too slow to respond before he’d twisted, shiv in hand, and nudged the hilt of a blade under Asher’s chin. It was an effective way of grabbing his attention.
“Don’t be a fool. Octavian may be gone, but Ambrose’s spies are everywhere. The more consumed he is with his pet, the more they try to get in with his progeny. All this jockeying for power’s gonna leave a lot of people dead.”
The blunt end of the knife grazing his Adam’s apple, Asher swallowed hard. “Way you’re going, you could be one of them.”
“So could you.”
Difference is, my life doesn’t matter. Halloran had his crew to think of. With him gone, they’d probably scatter—but not before tearing Sargasso apart in revenge.
Visions of Redemption drowning in flames and broken bodies flashed behind Asher’s eyes, as vivid as silent pictures. He didn’t know how to banish that horrid sight without hooking a hand around Halloran’s nape and dragging him close.
Their misaligned lips met in a harsh kiss. Asher surged into it with teeth and tongue, and didn’t stop when he tasted blood. He knew the flavor well by now. He didn’t shy from the potent, giddy sensation that came with Halloran bearing them into the dirt and covering Asher with his body.
The ground was hard beneath his back, Halloran as unyielding as marble, pressing him down. Breath became an afterthought as they yanked and fumbled with the fastenings of each other’s clothes. It didn’t matter that they could be seen for miles. The desire to feel Halloran’s bare skin beneath his hands had lit a fire in Asher’s chest that no wind chill could banish.
With inhuman speed, Halloran sat up to tug at his belt. He kept one hand cruelly pressed to Asher’s chest, lest he try to follow, and the short reprieve from his kisses triggered a protesting moan. Others followed once Halloran freed his cock.
“Is this what you want?” he growled, sliding a hand down his hard length.
Asher’s own erection twitched at the sight. “Let me up.”
Confusion flashed through Halloran’s eyes.
“Please,” Asher tried. “Please, I need…”
The pressure on his chest desisted before he could plead properly. It was just as well. The specifics eluded him but his yearning formed a sweeping fog fueled by Halloran’s touch.
Asher licked his lips. He might have been hazy on what he wanted precisely, but he knew how to go about getting it.
He followed Halloran’s retreat with less finesse than a vampire would have managed. He was hesitant in putting his hands on Halloran’s knees. Sliding them up was a herculean task. With every heartbeat, he expected Halloran to reverse them and have his way. He’d done it before, albeit at Asher’s instigation.
A fickle alloy of lust and dread vibrated in Asher’s chest as he dropped his head and slowly, more tentatively than he would have liked, put his mouth around Halloran. It was and wasn’t the same as doing it with a hot-blooded man. Halloran’s skin tasted faintly alkaline. His hips might as well have been carved of stone for how little they moved beneath Asher’s timid ministrations.
That wouldn’t do.
On a whim, Asher let his teeth graze the vein on the underside of Halloran’s cock. The answering hiss dispelled any illusion of stoicism. Asher redoubled his efforts, sucking in earnest, as he’d learned when he was sixteen and sneaking out to meet Wesley behind the church. As he’d done for tradesmen traveling through town when they liked the look of him. Keeping the cold at bay in a town like Sargasso was easier with a lover. Those who were there one day and gone the next were the safest. They taught Asher how to use his mouth. They helped him practice letting go.
Whatever small seed of affection bloomed in his chest when Halloran stroked his hair away from his brow or whispered soft praise, it had to be quashed. Asher pulled off with a twinge in his jaw and burning lungs, and pressed his mouth to Halloran’s. His fingers slid effortlessly through the mess of spit and pre-cum on Halloran’s length. Faster no
w, the way he liked to do it to himself. Faster, because Halloran’s teeth were no longer flat and harmless. Faster, because the sun was high and someone could stumble upon them. Asher stroked him faster because he wanted to see Halloran when he found his peak, in that liminal instant before pleasure subsumed all other sensation.
He didn’t have long to wait. Halloran gripped his hand, slotting his own thicker fingers through the gaps between Asher’s, and spilled between them with a harsh-bitten moan.
Asher swallowed the sound with frenzied, hungry kisses. The thin trickle of his blood, seeping from a small puncture in his lower lip, was a fair trade.
Tremors shook Halloran in the final throes before his grip curbed Asher’s caresses and forced him to stillness. If Halloran had had a heartbeat, Asher imagined he would have felt it beneath his hand. He didn’t mind the quiet. His own pulse hammered at his ears like a Gatling gun.
“Still thinking about who’s gonna try to kill us next?” Asher teased, sitting up. He wiped his hand against the thighs of his trousers. They were so dusty and stained already that one more smudge wouldn’t attract any notice.
Halloran hummed under his breath. “Is that what that was? A distraction?”
“What else?”
The look he leveled at Asher spelled out dubiety. “You didn’t,” he pointed out after another moment had elapsed.
“I’m fine,” Asher said, and meant it. His pants were a little tight and his cock practically throbbed with need, but that wasn’t reason enough to beg for Halloran’s hand.
He’d gotten this far without imploring his so-called master. Everything else was already forfeit, but not this. This last shred of pride, Asher meant to keep.
Hat slightly askew, Halloran propped himself on his elbows and peered up at him. “You know I can tell when you’re lying.”
The reminder stung. Asher smiled bitterly. “As if you’d let me forget it.”
“That’s not…” Halloran let out a long, exasperated breath and sat up the rest of the way. For a man who’d been boneless with pleasure just moments before, he was certainly dexterous in fastening his pants and cinching his belt. Dust rose up in saffron cloud when he scraped the heel of his boot into the dirt. Spurs jangled in the hush of the valley. “You’re one stubborn sprout, you know that?”