Riders on the Storm

by Rob Blackwell

  Miranda shook her head. “When did his words become sacred, Jules? You fought him like a cat when he was raising you, but now that he’s gone, you seem to have turned into him.”

  Jules bristled. “Shut up, Mira. Get the hell up, let’s get what we need, and get out of here. Leave Colonel Hero here to die if he wants.”

  She looked at Will angrily. This was all his fault. If he hadn’t put the idea of staying and fighting into Miranda’s head, it would never have been a question.

  “No,” Miranda said. She still sat by the saloon, but folded her arms in imitation of Will and Jules. “I’m staying with Will.”

  “You two don’t even like each other!”

  “I like him a damn sight better than you right now,” Miranda said. “I know you’re better than this. It wasn’t Father’s idea to save me, it was yours. You insisted on it. He would have left me to die. You say you’re no hero? Well, you’ve always been mine. Always. I just wish you could see yourself that way instead of the selfish brat our father tried to mold you into.”

  Jules stepped back like she’d been shot. She unexpectedly felt tears in her eyes and angrily wiped them away. She didn’t cry. Not for Miranda, not for anyone.

  “Fine,” she said. “Stay here. Stay here and die with the rest.”

  Jules turned on her heel and walked away.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “But the Vipers had an agenda beyond just building up their numbers. The way they spread out suggests purpose and reason. I suspect these creatures were also searching for something.”

  —Terry Jacobsen, “A History of the Supernatural,” 2013

  Jules was so angry she no longer knew where she was going.

  She was halfway down the street before she realized what she needed—a drink, preferably several. But Dy’s saloon was behind her, and she’d be damned if she could head back to see Miranda and Will again. Let them rot together. The two of them had barely agreed on the weather before, and now they were both consigning themselves to oblivion.

  As if defending this town was something she could do. As if their presence here would make a damn bit of difference. It was impossible.

  Her father’s voice was in her head, agreeing with her. “There’s no shame in a retreat. Once you make a plan, there’s no reason to keep to it if the situation goes south. If you need to abandon a job, that’s what you do. I’ve seen too many men forget this. It’s killed most of them.”

  He was right. Retreat made strategic sense.

  But her sister’s voice was also in her mind. She wasn’t there, but she might as well have been. “You’re supposed to help people, Jules. That’s what we were put on the earth to do.”

  “No, it’s not, Mira!” Jules said out loud, speaking to air and reminding herself of Crazy Pete. She didn’t care. “The world is pain and heartbreak. That’s not something Father taught me, it’s something I learned from my first breath. No mother to comfort me, no mother to tell me wrong from right. Just a father who taught me how to survive. Well, that’s what I’m doing, you hear me? You hear me?”

  “I hear you very well,” said a voice behind her.

  Jules turned around to find Luke behind her. The bastard had sneaked up on her without her ever hearing him.

  “You’re supposed to be getting supplies,” she said. “Unless you want to join Miranda and Will. They’ve decided to stay and make a stand against the damn storm.”

  “I needed to see to Pete first. I’ll get the supplies after we talk,” Luke said.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Did they send you to convince me? Tell me what a hero I’m supposed to be?”

  Luke shook his head. “I’m here on my own.”

  “You staying too?”

  “Not unless you are,” Luke said. “I’m bound to your fate, not theirs.”

  Jules looked away from him, abruptly realizing how dirty she was. She brushed at herself, but gave up after a minute. The grime would never come out.

  Finally, she shook her head, and looked back at Luke’s eyes.

  “What the hell is this really about for you? Why are you even here?”

  Luke looked up the street. “We’ve got some time before Hubert finishes his business,” he said. “The saloon up there doesn’t have your favorite bartender, but the whiskey tastes just as good.”

  She started walking there without even responding. It sounded like a damn fine idea to her.

  Maybe she was better off without Will and Miranda. Both would only slow her down. With just Luke and Pete, she could gain ground on Duggett, possibly run him to ground before he reached the Maelstrom. Of course, she’d have to go around whatever storm was coming, but if she were quick enough it was possible.

  She opened the saloon doors and found several men already at the bar. Their damn sheriff had just died, and they were back here drinking, instead of doing what they should—forming a posse and going after Duggett. They were going to wait for the law in some other town to find out about it and chase after the bandits when it would already be far too late.

  She swore at all of them, hoping for a fight. But the men on the stools slunk away to the table by the window. Nobody even looked her in the eye.

  “Whiskey,” she demanded from the barkeep, a pasty-faced boy who barely looked old enough to shave. She doubted he’d ever even been with a woman. Not that he would have a chance now. In a few hours, he’d be dead, along with everyone else in this cursed town.

  “If you don’t mind me saying,” Luke said next to her, “You seem a trifle upset.”

  “Vexed is the word you want,” Jules said. “We’ve found a way to get the vase, to get to my father, but Miranda and Will want to reenact Pickett’s Charge.”

  “The way I recall that battle, it was a foolhardy rush into a well-defended position,” Luke said. “Not exactly the same. The Vipers will be rushing us.”

  “Well, ain’t we just the professor of history today,” Jules said sulkily.

  She knew precious little about Pickett. History wasn’t a subject that particularly interested her. All that mattered was the right here and now.

  The bartender nervously poured her a glass, his hand shaking. As soon as he tipped the bottle up, she drank it down in a single gulp and tapped the glass for more. The bartender obliged.

  “The faster Hubert gets done, the sooner we can leave,” Jules said. “So talk quickly. What’s your business with me? Why were you telling Pete that he was a liar?”

  “I’m here because I’m repaying a debt,” Luke said. “An old debt.”

  “Something you promised my father?”

  Luke shook his head slightly. “Something I promised the Kid.”

  Jules downed the second whiskey and slammed the glass on the table. She tapped the glass.

  “I wish I understood what the hell everybody saw in that man,” she said. “Since it appears he’s at the bottom of this. From what Pete said, he created the Maelstrom. You got that part, right? He went after this vase—or a children’s toy, whatever the hell it was—and messed with it. When he did, a mighty storm erupted and the Vipers came out to play.”

  Somehow that had all sounded saner when Pete said it. She’d think it was crazy, but it made a wicked kind of sense.

  “The Kid goes missing about the same time as the Maelstrom shows up,” she continued. “I never thought about it before, but there’s a certain symmetry to it.”

  “There is,” Luke said.

  “But you don’t believe it?”

  Luke looked away from her. “Don’t want to, I guess,” he said. “But as you say, there is a certain logic.”

  “All right,” she said. “So spit it out. What made the Kid so inspiring that you’re repaying a debt by following me on a suicide mission?”

  “Let’s just say the Kid had a certain knack to him,” Luke said. “When I made my way out here, I had… particular skills, but I was impetuous and angry. I had a tendency to get into fights, and shoot my way out of ‘em.”


  Jules gave him a skeptical look. “I haven’t known you all that long, but that doesn’t exactly sound like you.”

  “I’ve changed,” Luke said. “Grown older and applied myself under different teachers. Do you know what I did before I came out here some twenty years ago?”

  Jules shook her head.

  “I hunted slaves,” Luke said.

  She stared at him, momentarily forgetting about her fight with Will and Miranda. Her brow furrowed.

  “But you were a—”

  Luke nodded. “I was a slave. My master used me first for hunting animals. Eventually, I worked my way up. He had me hunting the ultimate prey—man.”

  Jules gave him an appraising look. “No offense, but didn’t that trouble your conscience some?”

  He gave her a sly look. “Does robbing men tickle your conscience much?”

  “That’s different,” she said. “It’s all I’ve ever known.”

  She said it reflexively before realizing the importance of her words. Luke nodded at her.

  “Then you know my situation perfectly,” he said. “I didn’t see how I rightly had a choice. If I’d refused, I would have been whipped, beaten or worse. And I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a certain satisfaction to my work. It was as if they’d violated some unspoken pact by leaving. As if I was angry at them for trying to seize what I could never have—freedom. I don’t imagine that makes much sense to you.”

  Now it was her turn to give him a knowing look. “Oh, yes, I know nothing about hating women who dress up pretty and stroll the streets with a beau beside her, the ones who aren’t worrying about their next job, the ones whose fathers don’t savagely berate them when they fail to measure up. That is completely alien to my experience.”

  He nodded at her, and she suddenly understood why she’d trusted him at the bank. Luke was an outcast like her—and like Miranda, who navigated her own self-induced exile from her people and tried to live in a world that didn’t understand her. All three of them were outcasts.

  “But eventually you stopped. Why?” she asked.

  Luke smiled slightly. “A woman.”

  She waited for him to continue, but he seemed to want to leave it there.

  “And?” she said, finally.

  “She persuaded me of many things,” he said. “I won’t burden you with the details, but she woke me up to certain truths.”

  His lips curled when he said those words, as if there was an unpleasant taste in his mouth.

  “You walked away,” Jules said.

  “You make it sound like it was easy,” Luke said. “It was not. I had a privileged position for a slave. I was a favored pet, treated well, given scraps from his table. I looked down on the rest, saw them as weak and my master as strong. By the time I realized the truth of things, I’d committed a great many sins. When I left, my master came after me hard. I’d trained others, you see, other men who wanted what I had thrown aside. They eventually caught up to me. There was a reckoning.”

  “I’ll bet there was.”

  She waited for more details, but again, he didn’t seem inclined to share them. It was frustrating, as if she were hearing only half a story.

  “What happened to your master?”

  “A story for another time,” he said. “All you need to know is that I survived. But by the time I came out here, I was full of spitfire, ready to battle anyone and everything that gave me a wayward glance. I think a part of me wanted to die. It was the Kid who changed all that.”

  She couldn’t understand it. What kind of man could have a hold on Luke so many years later? Or her father, for that matter?

  “What’d he look like? The stories say he always wore a bandanna.”

  “Truthfully, I don’t know myself,” Luke said. “I never saw him without it. He wore it even at camp.”

  “Why? Did he have some hideous scar?”

  “Perhaps,” Luke said. “All I know is he never took that scarf off. I found him sleeping in it more than once.”

  Jules considered this. She didn’t see how you could work for someone whose face you never properly saw.

  “But those eyes…” Luke said.

  Jules cocked an eyebrow for him to continue.

  “Sky blue and deadly,” he said. “He saw right through you, of that I was sure. Saw me for who and what I was the first time I met him.”

  “How’d you meet?”

  “I robbed a bank. Stood out like a sore thumb, a man of my coloring taking down a bank. The law came after me and I was anxious for a fight. The Kid found me first, along with Trent Castle. I turned down his first offer. I saw him as another master, you see, another one who wanted to use me as a tool.”

  Jules nodded, assuming that was the case. The Kid was known as a ruthless son of a gun, not one for mercy.

  “But he saw something in me, too,” Luke continued. “Talent, maybe, I’m not sure, or a certain defiance of the system. Unknown to me at the time, he helped lead the law off my tail that first robbery. Then he let me alone until I got myself into another scrape with the law. He offered his help and this time I took it.”

  “Why?”

  “He gave me a choice,” Luke said. “There’s quite a lot of power in that.”

  Jules nodded, though she wasn’t sure she followed him, exactly.

  “He could have tried to blackmail me, but he didn’t,” Luke said. “He could have shot me dead. But he backed off and waited. And I needed his help, which he gave. I know his reputation, but he was a fair man. He collected people like you and me. Outcasts.”

  It was so close to what she’d been thinking earlier, she half wondered if Luke was a mind reader.

  “He found men of talent too, like Trent. He split the money down the line, and never abandoned one of his own if he could help it. How many criminals can say that? Damn few. I know from personal experience.”

  Jules’ curiosity got the better of her.

  “So what was he like?” she asked. “People always talk about him like he was some kind of ghost.”

  “It’s an apt description,” Luke said. “He said very little. He let Trent do the talking most of the time. I sometimes wondered whether the Kid was actually in charge, but when Trent did something stupid, the Kid didn’t hesitate to let him know it. He spoke in harsh tones and brooked no disobedience of any kind.”

  “I thought you said he gave you a choice,” Jules said.

  “So he did. About what jobs to take, about how and when to dispatch a foe. If you didn’t want to kill a man, the Kid didn’t make you. But you best take him out of commission. He gave a goal and you worked toward it. Within that was a certain flexibility. He treated me with more respect than any white man I’ve met before or since. Listened to my counsel. Took some of it, ignored me other times, but never dismissed it out of hand. He saved me, Jules Castle, gave me a place when others would have given me nothing but scorn. He treated me like any other—and that is all I’ve ever sought since.”

  “So what happened? Why’d he go running off?”

  “The Kid was a mysterious man,” he said. “Trent would laugh and joke with the other men, but the Kid stayed away. He brooded a lot, from what I knew of him—and spent a lot of time book reading in his tent. He did everything on his own much of the time. And then there were times when he’d vanish. He’d be gone for days, weeks and even months. Trent was left in charge—you’ll find no more devoted number-two—and the Kid always came back.”

  “And one day he didn’t?”

  Luke nodded. “I think the most he’d been away was six months. That last time he came back a different man. He was looking for something, that much I knew. What exactly it was I never fully understood.”

  “A vase?”

  Luke nodded. “That word was mentioned. Something he thought could help him, at any rate. Something he believed was necessary.”

  “Necessary for what?”

  Luke didn’t answer immediately and Jules realized with dismay she’d neglected t
o drink the whiskey in front of her. She corrected the problem, but sipped at it rather than drinking it straight, and waited for Luke to start talking again.

  “I said he came back a different man, but that’s not precisely the truth of it,” Luke said. “He came back with… someone. Someone who had changed his perspective.”

  “Not the first bandit to bring a woman back to camp,” Jules said, smiling.

  “True, but this wasn’t what you think,” Luke said. “He brought back a baby.”

  Jules choked on her whiskey. “What?” she asked.

  Luke was giving her a hard stare and she felt like her stomach had dropped out from beneath her. All of a sudden she felt dizzy.

  “I gotta go,” she said.

  She stumbled out of the saloon, abruptly sure she didn’t want Luke to continue. But he caught her shoulder on the street. She was breathing hard.

  “You can’t be saying what I think you’re saying,” Jules said.

  “The Kid came back with a baby,” Luke said. “And it may be the first other person he ever truly cared about, because his plans were different. He’d heard from some soothsayer, the Lady of Shadows. That woman had spun a terrible tale about the baby’s future. The Kid wanted to stop it. And he thought this vase would help him do it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t rightly know,” he said. “Nor do I know why he left. We normally did everything as a gang. The idea that he hired Pete and went to that mountain by himself doesn’t sit right. But perhaps he did. He left the baby in Trent Castle’s charge and vanished into the night. We never saw him again.”

  Jules sat down on the ground. The world was tilting again, but she didn’t think it was the alcohol that was doing it.

  “Just spit it out already,” Jules said. “Say what you’ve been screwing up the courage to say.”

  “The baby was you,” Luke said. “Even if I hadn’t seen that baby myself, I would know the truth. Your eyes are a different color—gray where his were blue. But they have the same intensity, that sense of sizing up a man in a single glance. There’s no mistaking it. You’re the daughter of the Kid.”