Ancient Enemy Box Set [Books 1-4]

by Lukens, Mark

  After the barkeep set the bowls of stew on the bar top, Jed took a bowl of stew with a chunk of bread sunk down into it and a cup of tea to the table where David sat. “You eat up,” he told the boy.

  David had taken off his coat at some point and slung it over the back of his chair. He pulled his hat back and took a bite of the stew. He tore off a piece of the bread, devouring it.

  Jed went back to the bar to get the other bowl of stew.

  “Uh,” Moody said, approaching Jed. He couldn’t seem to hide his curiosity. “Is there some reason you’re traveling with that Indian boy?”

  Jed didn’t answer for a moment as he stood in front of the bar with the bowl of stew on it. “I found him in his home. His parents and brother were murdered.”

  Moody’s eyes widened in shock. “You know who did it?”

  Jed hesitated again. He shook his head. “I was taking Red Moon in for a bounty when me and my men were ambushed.”

  “Red Moon?” Moody asked in a whisper of awe. “You caught Red Moon?”

  “He got away. He might’ve killed that boy’s family. He killed my two deputies and stole our horses. I think his gang attacked us.”

  “And Red Moon got away,” Moody whispered.

  A memory of Red Moon flashed through Jed’s mind. He saw Red Moon staring at him with his bound hands shackled in front of him, arms straining, his eyes wide with fear. Shoot me. You promised.

  “Red Moon and his men may be around,” Jed said as he looked at the others in the saloon. “We all need to stay alert.” He looked right at Sanchez. “What about you? You riding with Red Moon’s gang?”

  Sanchez didn’t answer. He sulked in the chair.

  “You hear anything about Red Moon’s gang?” Jed asked Sanchez.

  “I don’t ride with any gangs,” Sanchez answered. “I’m not an outlaw. I was on my way back to Mexico. Back to my family.”

  Jed turned back to the bar and downed his glass of whiskey. He left his bowl of stew at the bar as he walked past Sanchez towards the Navajo in the back room. “What about you, fella?”

  The Navajo looked up at Jed, watching him approach. He was an older man, maybe in his late fifties or early sixties. His tanned face was a map of wrinkles, his dark eyes set deep under his brow.

  “You know anything about Red Moon’s gang?”

  “Because I am Navajo, you think I know every other Navajo in the world?”

  “That’s not an answer to my question,” Jed told him.

  “I have heard of Red Moon,” the Navajo man answered. “But I do not know him. Or his men.”

  “That’s Nez,” Esmerelda said, standing up from the piano stool and staring at Jed. “I don’t know his full name, but everyone just calls him Billy. He comes into town a few times a month to trade.”

  Jed looked at Esmerelda. Now that he was closer to her, he thought she was even more striking in a strange way. Not beautiful, but the word exotic came to mind. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Esmerelda smiled at him and sat back down on the piano stool.

  Jed was about to return to the bar. He saw that David was turned around in his chair, watching him talk to Billy. Jed looked back at Billy. “You know this boy?”

  Billy looked across the room at David for a long moment.

  Jed swore he saw recognition in Billy’s eyes, but finally the old man shook his head. “No. I do not know him.”

  Jed nodded at the Navajo man and started walking to the bar again, but this time Billy’s words stopped him.

  “The Darkwind is powerful magic.”

  “What did you say?” Jed asked Billy Nez as he turned back around to look at him.

  “I said the Darkwind is powerful magic.”

  Darkwind. Red Moon had said that same word. The wind had blown suddenly in the woods, shaking the tree he was chained to. He had looked up and called it the Darkwind.

  “The Darkwind is out there now,” Billy said, nodding towards the saloon doors at the other end of the room. “And it brings something evil with it.”

  “He’s right,” Esmerelda said. “I can feel something real bad out there.”

  “It’s just a storm,” Jed told Esmerelda, and then he looked at Billy. “Besides, I don’t believe in that stuff.”

  Billy Nez studied Jed for a long moment, and then he nodded like he’d reached some kind of conclusion he’d been internally debating. “You have already seen the Darkwind. You have seen what it can do.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Jed snapped. He could feel the skin on his face and neck heating up with the lie he was telling. “All I know is some Indians were pretending to be skinwalkers and they killed my men.”

  The saloon went silent again for a moment—there was nothing but the sound of the howling wind outside.

  Billy stared at Jed for a long moment, his dark eyes never looking away. “Yenaldooshi,” he whispered.

  “What the hell’s a skinwalker?” the cowboy slurred as he turned around in his chair to stare at Jed with drunk eyes and a lopsided smile. Rose broke into nervous laughter beside the cowboy, spurring him on.

  The tension in the room was broken by their laughter.

  “Red Moon’s men might be out there,” Jed said, ignoring the cowboy’s question. He looked at Moody, Karl, and the barkeep, walking back to them. “We all need to stay alert.”

  Jed pulled up a barstool and began to eat his stew.

  Moody, buzzing with nervous energy, walked to the front doors of the saloon and looked out through the glass at the swirling sandstorm.

  “One more,” Karl said to the barkeep.

  The bartender came over and poured a shot of whiskey for Karl.

  “I hope this storm lets up soon,” Karl said. “I don’t want Ingrid to get worried about me.”

  “I’m sure she knows where you are,” the barkeep joked.

  Jed looked back to check on David and make sure he was eating his stew. David was watching Rose and the cowboy as they giggled. Rose whispered something into the man’s ear. He nodded and jumped to his feet. She hurried for the stairs, her low-heeled ankle boots clicking on the wood floorboards. The cowboy grabbed his bottle and raced after Rose up the stairs. At the top of the steps, they disappeared down the other hall to the left and out of view from the saloon. David watched them the whole way. Upstairs, a door slammed shut.

  There was a whoop from the cowboy upstairs, and Esmerelda began playing the piano again to mask the sound.

  Jed turned back to his stew. The stew was good, the bread even better. He felt a little better, even though the sadness and strangeness of what had happened to Roscoe and Dobbs still weighed on him. But at least he could bring Sanchez in for a bounty, making up for some of his lost money. It was little compensation, but Jed didn’t care. He just wanted the storm to end soon so he could get Sanchez and David on the trail up to Smith Junction and put all of this behind him.

  CHAPTER 12

  Two hours later night had come. An hour after sunset the sandstorm died down suddenly, the wind ceasing almost instantly. For a moment the silence inside the saloon was eerie. Esmeralda had quit playing the piano an hour earlier, helping the barkeep clean up the dishes and put away the food.

  The barkeep had lit more of the lanterns on the wall sconces and the ones inside the wooden chandelier as soon as night came.

  Karl paid his bar tab as soon as the storm was over, slapping two coins down on the beaten-up bar top.

  The only other sound inside the saloon was someone singing lowly. Jed turned and stared at Billy who was still seated at the back table. He was chanting, and his chants sounded similar to the ones Red Moon had sung in the woods. Billy had the eagle feather from his hatband in his hand, waving it around slowly in front of him with his eyes half closed.

  Jed walked over to David’s table. The boy looked exhausted, ready to fall asleep right there in the chair. “Get your coat on, David. We’re heading out soon.”

  “You’re leaving now?” Moody asked. “In the dark?
”

  “Yessir. We’ll make camp a few miles north of here.”

  “I don’t know why you won’t take a room for the night,” Moody grumbled.

  Jed didn’t feel like explaining himself to Moody. He looked at Sanchez who was slumped down in his chair, doing his best to get comfortable after being tied to the chair for the last three hours. “Where’s your horse?”

  “Livery,” Sanchez answered.

  “Where’s the livery?”

  Sanchez stared at Jed, declining to answer.

  Jed looked at Moody, waiting for directions to the livery.

  “It’s just beyond the buildings across the street, back by the miners’ cabins.”

  Karl grabbed his overcoat from the coatrack and slipped into it. His pale face was red from drinking too much. He went to the double doors to go outside.

  Jed walked over to the bar. “Barkeep, I’d like one bottle of whiskey to take with me. And I’d like some of that tea for the boy. Do you have any sugar for it?”

  “Certainly. I’ll put some tea and sugar in a glass jar for you.”

  “Much obliged.”

  The barkeep went to work pouring the tea.

  “How about some hard candy and some jerky?” Esmerelda offered as she walked over to where the barkeep had just been behind the bar.

  Jed glanced back at David who had a hopeful look about the hard candy. Jed turned back to Esmerelda and nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  The double doors of the saloon crashed open as Karl rushed back inside.

  Jed’s hand automatically went for his pistol, ready to draw.

  “What is the matter, Karl?” Moody asked.

  Karl stood at the doors, one of them still open. He looked like he was confused about something. He stared at Moody. “The whole town is dark. Not a single lantern lit anywhere.”

  “What do you mean?” Moody asked, already walking towards Karl.

  “Every building . . . no one has a lantern lit at all. Not a sound out there, either.” Karl’s voice was rising, the pitch higher, his bright blue eyes wide.

  Jed’s stomach twisted into a knot, and that now-familiar feeling of oppressive dread weighed down on him. This was the same way he’d felt when they had first entered the woods. It was the same way he’d felt when he’d woken up and found Dobbs gone. And then Roscoe. This was the same way he’d felt when he had opened the door to David’s house and smelled the stench of blood and rotting meat. It was the foreboding feeling of danger, but not just any danger, something beyond that, something so bad that he couldn’t fathom it, something beyond his understanding.

  Moody brushed past Karl and stepped out onto the front porch of the saloon, leaving the door wide open. Karl followed him back outside.

  Jed left his goods on the bar top, grabbed his coat, and walked to the double doors, stepping out onto the wooden walkway, pulling the door almost all the way shut behind him. An energy buzzed through him, an electrical tingling on his skin as he stood there in front of the doors to the saloon. His right hand twitched slightly, nerves already firing in his body, already preparing for danger and waiting for his mind to catch up. That same feeling he’d had in the woods came back to him, that feeling that a rifle shot or an arrow was going to stab him from the dark at any second. He felt like a man at the edge of a thunderstorm and exposed to a lightning strike. But now that lightning storm

  (Darkwind)

  was gone, and it had left nothing but silence and darkness in its wake.

  The floorboards of the deck in front of the saloon were still scattered with sand and bits of broken twigs and dead leaves from the scrub brush shaken apart by the winds and blown down the main street of the town. Light poured out of the saloon’s front windows, the building so brightly lit compared to the other dark buildings in the town.

  Karl was right—there wasn’t a single lantern or candle lit anywhere in town.

  Jed looked to his left, towards the end of the wooden deck. The lights from the saloon windows along with the full moon provided enough light for Jed to see that the rope he had tied to the end of the hitching rail wasn’t stretched towards the alleyway between the two buildings anymore. Now the piece of rope hung down from the end of the hitching rail.

  “Our horses are gone,” Jed said.

  “You left them out in the storm?” Karl asked as he turned around to look at Jed. His words were slurred slightly.

  Jed glared at Karl. “No, I had them tied to the end of that hitching rail down there, but I left enough slack so they could stand in the alley and be protected from the storm.”

  Moody walked past Jed and Karl. He opened the saloon door and poked his head inside. “Get me a lantern out here!”

  Jed didn’t wait for the lantern. He marched to the end of the walkway and hopped down onto the dirt, searching the darkness of the alley. But he already knew the horses were gone. He didn’t see them. He couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t smell them.

  He walked the few steps to the end of the hitching rail and inspected the rope he had tied there hours ago. He picked up the end of it and studied it for a moment. The rope looked just like the one in the woods had looked, not cut but snapped. Torn apart.

  A thundering of footsteps approached.

  Jed looked at Moody and Karl as they hurried towards him, Moody holding an oil lantern by a wire handle.

  “Horses are gone,” Jed said, still holding the remaining length of rope in his hand as evidence.

  “The storm,” Moody said.

  Jed shook his head. “Someone took them.” He offered the end of the rope to Moody as evidence.

  Moody took the rope and looked at it for a moment, but Jed could tell the man didn’t understand what he was seeing.

  “You think someone stole your horses during the storm?” Karl asked.

  Moody let the rope drop out of his fingers.

  “They could’ve run off,” Karl suggested. “The storm might have spooked them, and they snapped the rope.”

  Jed didn’t bother answering Karl. He looked across the street at the line of dark buildings silhouetted against the night sky. There were still no lanterns or candles lit in any of the windows or outside the doors on the porches. No one was coming out of the buildings. “How many people live in this town?”

  “Why do you ask, marshal?” Moody wondered.

  Jed stared at Moody.

  “About forty,” Moody answered and looked at Karl like he was double-checking with him. “Maybe forty-two or forty-three. I don’t know. I haven’t taken a headcount recently.”

  Jed looked beyond the two men at the rest of the town that disappeared into the darkness, the line of buildings on both sides of the dirt street stretching towards the white church, its steeple a black spire pointing up at the sky. The moon’s light splashed down on the shingled roofs of the buildings and the part of the street that the buildings’ deeper shadows didn’t touch.

  “The mines all shut down about nine months ago,” Moody said as if he needed to provide an explanation of why so few people lived in the town. “Silver and copper ran out. The miners and prospectors moved on, taking a fair share of the merchants with them.”

  Karl nodded in agreement, his vivid blue eyes rimmed in red and moist in the lantern light.

  “I couldn’t leave,” Moody continued. “I have everything I own tied up in this saloon and hotel.” He looked at Karl.

  “Me too,” Karl said. He glanced down the street where Jed was still staring, itching to get down to his store and his wife and boys.

  “It’s a rough situation,” Moody said. “But we get by. Help each other out. I believe prospectors will come back. Probably a bigger mining company, one that can spend the money to drill deeper into the mountain. I believe there’s still plenty of silver and copper in those hills. I’m certain of it.”

  “Forty people,” Jed muttered.

  “At least forty,” Moody corrected.

  “Awful quiet for forty people,” Jed said.

>   “You mind if I borrow your lantern, Moody,” Karl asked. “I need to get down to my store.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Jed told Karl.

  Esmerelda and Billy Nez came out of the saloon with David. “He was worried about you,” Esmerelda explained.

  David dashed over to Jed’s side.

  “We’re going to check on Karl’s store,” Moody told Esmerelda. “We’re going to make sure Ingrid and Karl’s boys are okay.”

  “We’re coming, too,” Esmerelda said.

  “Wait a minute—” Moody began.

  “Free country,” Esmerelda said, cutting his words off. “We can go where we please.”

  “But the boy?” Moody asked.

  “He’s staying with me,” Jed told him.

  “There could be danger out here,” Moody argued with Jed. “Why, you just said yourself that Red Moon’s gang could be around.”

  “Could be,” Jed agreed. “Could also be another gang of outlaws. Could also be nothing.”

  “We need another lantern and another gun,” Moody said, rushing back inside the saloon.

  The barkeep watched Moody as he approached.

  “We’re going down to Karl’s store,” Moody told the barkeep. “Get me that lantern back there and the shotgun from behind the bar.”

  The barkeep set the lit lantern on the bar top in front of Moody, then bent down and got the shotgun from underneath the bar.

  “You keep an eye on the marshal’s prisoner while we’re gone,” Moody told the barkeep.

  The barkeep’s eyes grew big, and they darted to Sanchez tied to his chair.

  “He can’t go anywhere,” Moody grumbled as he took the lantern and shotgun with him back to the double doors.

  As soon as Moody was back outside, all of them stepped down off of the wooden platform, down to the dirt street.

  Six people and a child, Jed thought. One pistol and a shotgun. He didn’t like those odds . . . not after what he’d seen in the woods.

  Coyotes yipped in the distance.

  “Storm got the coyotes stirred up,” Moody said.

  Jed didn’t like the sound of the coyotes. It sounded almost like they were communicating with each other, like they were talking in some strange language. And laughing.