The Angel's Fire

by Holley Trent

  Gulielmus scoffed. “Right. All I had was my looks and my body, and I used them.”

  And a touch that could steal away years of life, but Tarik didn’t think that needed to be said. The affliction had been meant to be a curse. The demons had taught Gulielmus to use it as a gift.

  “And look at me now, hmm? More powerful than any of you.”

  “Your power has a dark taint,” Tarik reminded him.

  Gulielmus rolled his eyes. “Your mood has a dark taint. You could clear a room in thirty seconds with your entirely too grave subject choices. I asked you a question. I’d like to know what my friend does when he’s not depriving bounty hunters of their pay.”

  “Exploring.”

  “Oh?”

  “I still have plenty of curiosity left. I know that may be difficult for many of our kind to fathom.”

  “And what have you found?” Gulielmus asked silkily, one corner of his mouth tilting upward.

  Who? he’d meant. Tarik wasn’t going to play that game with him.

  “The Spanish colonies.”

  Gulielmus waited in silence for a minute for the likely “and.” There was no and.

  He sighed. “I haven’t explored there much. The last thing I need is a new distraction. I’m still trying to recover from New Orleans. Such a delightfully wicked place.”

  “Rejuvenating for a creature such as you, I’m sure.”

  “Indeed.” Gulielmus showed off every one of his straight white teeth and then made his way to Tarik’s chair. “Well. Work beckons.”

  “I won’t keep you. Perhaps the next time we cross paths, it’ll be for old time’s sake and not for anything one of your little brats has done.”

  Gulielmus sighed yet again. “I’ll forward your money to the usual place.”

  “Much appreciated.”

  “Are you going to let me fix that?”

  “What?”

  Gulielmus gestured to Tarik’s wing. “Let me fix it. I know you’d prefer to wear your suffering like a badge, but better than anyone, I know the pain you’re in.”

  Tarik waved it off. “It’s in the back of my mind. Merely a low hum at this point.”

  “That may be so, but let me fix it anyway.”

  “You know I can’t let you do that.” Tarik wished he could. He wanted to be able to take to the air again without pain and to pull his wings in closer when moving through congested crowds. Gulielmus’s touch simply wasn’t something he was willing to risk. Like he’d said, his friend’s power had a darkness about it. Tarik already had enough enemies without other secretive beings sensing the evidence of a powerful incubus’s touch.

  “Perhaps one day, you’ll change your mind.”

  “I hope that when I finally do, you’ll no longer have the ability to assist me.”

  They stared at each other for a long while. Gulielmus spinning his ring. Tarik trying futilely to pop his wing joint’s cartilage.

  Then Gulielmus gripped the lapels of Tarik’s tattered greatcoat, murmured, “Gods, your wardrobe is appalling,” and then vanished.

  Shaking his head, Tarik pulled his Mexican gentleman appearance about him and tugged his wings in tight in preparation for a small trip. He needed to check on the condition of a bit of lacy fabric he’d loaned to a lady once.

  The last time he’d seen the butterfly, she’d been disguised as a vagrant and was helping to dig a well for some Cougars in a remote New Mexican village.

  He checked the time on his pocket watch. The sun was going down there.

  Perhaps she’d finished.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1870

  Western New Mexico

  “Do you want me to kill him or kick him out? I cannot tell from all your blubbering.” The nameless one—known temporarily as Lola Chávez—gave the tarted-up young Cougar woman in her office doorway a querying look.

  Elizabeth sniffled wetly, dragged the handkerchief she’d pulled from her bosom across her red nose, and took a deep breath. “Well, I don’t know. He’s offerin’ a lot of money, Lola.”

  And Elizabeth needed the money. She had a young nephew back in Texas whom she was trying to arrange transport for. She’d been short on funds ever since she’d shown up in the area. The naïve innocent had let herself get swindled by a smooth-talking Cougar who’d promised her the sun and moon. He’d transported her all the way from Fort Worth and had promised to marry her and set her up right. The moment they’d arrived in Maria, he’d left her high and dry. He’d taken a look at her in her Sunday best and listened to her story about the rich uncle who’d lived there. The rich uncle was dead. He obviously hadn’t heard that part.

  Once he’d realized there’d be no life of luxury waiting for him in the wild frontier town, he’d taken her money, the few things of value from her valise, and knocked her out of his wagon.

  It’d taken Lola all of three minutes to sense there was a needy newcomer Cat in town. Elizabeth’s misery could have roused even the coldest of statues from slumber. She’d collected Elizabeth from the desert, begged a room for the night from the aggravating innkeeper, and then went to deal with the thief.

  It’d been three months. He was still likely trawling the desert for sustenance at that very moment in his animal form, trying to figure out why he couldn’t shift back.

  He’d never be able to. Eventually, he’d stop remembering he’d once been a person. He was lucky she hadn’t wanted to waste her energy on executing a stricter punishment.

  Lola cracked her knuckles and watched Elizabeth dry her eyes with the tattered corner of her last linen handkerchief. In spite of Lola’s best efforts, Elizabeth had wanted to be a whore. Washerwomen didn’t get paid enough and Elizabeth couldn’t prepare food well enough for to be a cook, either.

  Pondering, Lola tuned into the sounds on the bottom floor of the saloon. Chairs dragging against the floor. Shouting. Shattering glass. Cowboys stomping up the stairs to their rented rooms, probably with mud all over their grimy boots.

  Business as usual.

  Cougar or not, Elizabeth’s sensibilities were too delicate for the place. The group of Cats she’d come from had been sheltered and coddled for too long, and there was nothing wrong with that, really. They never caused trouble.

  “I will give you the money for your nephew,” Lola said.

  “But you don’t have money to spare.”

  True. Lola had given up on waiting for Elizabeth to demonstrate she possessed anything resembling a functional verbal filter. She spoke too plainly. Too much a Cougar in that way, perhaps, and all Lola’s fault, in truth. When she’d forced that first group of bastards down onto four legs, she’d done so while cursing them that their daughters would make them as miserable as they deserved. It was part of the female Cougar’s constitution to be unyielding to their male counterparts. Centuries later, she still considered that to be a stroke of genius on her part.

  Lola rolled a cigarillo between her palm and her desktop, fixing the lachrymose woman in her stare.

  She employed ten Cougars in various capacities and paid as well as she could. None were there against their wills. Some were from families that had lived in Maria for the same number of years Lola had. Others had migrated when they’d heard there was a small group of Cougars in the old mission town.

  Lola had gone there because her son had been there first. Yaotl didn’t approve of her profession. When she’d decided that she needed more lucrative work that would allow her to maintain her anonymity, she’d told him her plans—that she’d run a saloon and brothel. Men would pay for liquor and sex, even if they wouldn’t pay to keep a roof over their heads.

  They’d argued. He’d stormed off, headed towards gods-knew-where.

  For once, she’d decided to stay put. She’d needed a rest from roaming. If Yaotl returned, she’d be there. They’d likely argue some more, because after five years, she was still in the same trade and not even close to wealthy.

  Success did not smile kindly on women in the Wild West.
r />   Elizabeth was still standing there, shifting her weight, looking expectantly to Lola.

  Lola sighed.

  What do you want me to do?

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “Just tell him to be nice! Then it won’t be so bad, you know?”

  Lola tilted her head at the woman. “Pardon me?”

  “I mean, I don’t know. Just talk to him, I guess. He’s scared of you. Folks already know you’ve got a quick trigger finger. I think sometimes, they like to push their luck a little.”

  Lola gave her head a shake. As fascinating as Elizabeth’s speech had been, that hadn’t been what Lola was asking her. She’d responded as though she’d heard Lola’s thoughts. That wouldn’t be strange, though it would certainly be unusual.

  Hmm.

  Lola tapped her chin and put her weight against the edge of her desk. Certainly, she hadn’t gotten so old that she’d forgotten what happened sometimes when creatures like her lived too closely with mortals. Often, unpredictable sorts of connections formed.

  She decided to test her theory.

  “I didn’t say anything, Elizabeth.”

  Elizabeth snatched her little glasses off her face and squinted unseeing at Lola as she buffed them on her silk dress. “Yes you did.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure of what?” Elizabeth nudged her glasses back on.

  “Interesting.”

  “What is? Wait… I knew it. Your mouth isn’t moving!”

  “That was because I was not speaking.” Lola battened down the psychic seepage from her mind and perched on the edge of her rock-hard chair. She couldn’t complain much about the chair’s unpleasing construction. It hadn’t been built with short adults in mind. It’d been built to hold the weights of sloppy drunk men. “That hasn’t happened in centuries. Not since the second generation.”

  “What? Someone hearing you like that?”

  “Someone who wasn’t a being of my level? Yes.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes went round behind her thick lenses. “There something wrong with me?”

  “Yes,” Lola murmured.

  “Darn it. You’re not gonna kill me or nothin’, are you?”

  “No.” Lola didn’t see where that would do her any good. Beyond Yaotl, Elizabeth was the only Cougar, probably anywhere, who knew Lola wasn’t who she appeared to be. There were some people even Lola and her ilk couldn’t completely hide their natures from. Fortunately, Elizabeth had the soundness of mind to keep her mouth shut on the matter, and had ever since Lola had rescued her from the desert. No one else would have believed her, anyway. No Cougar ever saw their goddess. The ones in town all thought Lola was just another Cat, and she liked things that way. For the first time, she belonged to a group as “just one more” and not as the font of all the magic, lingering on the outskirts.

  It was almost as good as disappearing.

  “If you do not wish to consort with Mr. Harris and take his money today,” Lola said, eager to change the subject, “perhaps we can arrange for some other way for you to get your nephew here.”

  “Other’n the magic one, you mean? He’s not gonna understand magic.”

  “No, I imagine he would not.” He wasn’t a Cougar. The little boy probably had no idea what his aunt was. Although Elizabeth was a natural-born Cougar, her half-sister was purely human. Elizabeth had inherited the trait from her mother. Her father knew nothing of her mother’s true nature.

  “And I gotta find a different job before he gets here, too.” Elizabeth straightened up fast, wide-eyed again. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with the current one, but—”

  Lola waved off the explanation. “You forget how my son feels about this.”

  “Oh, he’ll come around. Old as he is, he should know how tough it is for a lady to make a dollar.” Elizabeth grimaced. “Or a peso. Not that many options out here unless we want to squeeze out one little baby after another. In my estimation, that isn’t a job. That’s a life sentence.”

  “Not so bad of one, depending on who your warden is.”

  “True.” Elizabeth snapped her fingers. “Oh! I know what I’ll do. We got any of that knock-out liquor left?”

  Lola could almost see the plan coming together in Elizabeth’s head. People tended to underestimate her because she did so much of her thinking aloud, but when she had ideas, they usually had good legs.

  Lola opened her drawer and pulled out the half-finished bottle. She’d gotten it in a trade. A Coyote passing through town had wanted a bath and had been short on cash. Water for booze seemed a fair swap, given the drought they were in.

  She handed Elizabeth the bottle.

  “I’ll go slide him a shot of that while he’s playing those damn cards and give him another soon after. We’ll get him upstairs and he won’t know what he did or didn’t do.”

  “And he will still pay you.”

  Elizabeth grinned. “Yep. Maybe it’s not so honest, but the way I see it, he owes me, and it wouldn’t be nice for me to let you toast him.”

  Weary, Lola dragged a hand down her face, forgetting about all the paint on it. She’d have to repair her appearance before going downstairs to play the role of gregarious hostess. The role didn’t suit her, but a job was a job, and she only had to do it five nights per week. “I should have never let you see that. It was a rare moment of weakness. I do not like to use magic when I can resolve my conflicts in human ways.”

  When a bandit had broken into the saloon early one Sunday morning, barely a day after Elizabeth’s arrival, Lola had been fresh out of patience. It’d been a long, stressful weekend trying to keep the cowboys from getting too randy with her girls.

  She’d snapped.

  He’d burned.

  “Oh, hush.” Elizabeth slid the bottle into the pocket hidden in the gathers of her dress. “Not like there were witnesses, except me.”

  If there had been witnesses, Lola would have had to make some hard decisions about what to do with them as well. Before that weekend when that lowlife bastard had disturbed them, she hadn’t called on her magic in significant ways in at least a century. Perhaps she’d acted to excess with the would-be thief, using fire when less destructive methods would have sufficed, but apparently, the magic had been in want of an outlet. She hadn’t been able to hold back.

  “You should be more frightened of me,” Lola said as Elizabeth put her hand on the doorknob.

  “Why?”

  “Because I am unpredictable.”

  Elizabeth snorted. “To who? Me? Maybe you’re right and there’s something wrong with me, but I can always tell when you’re mad. You’re not usually mad at me.”

  Lola didn’t have a response to that sort of logic.

  Elizabeth had just turned the knob when the door rattled with a tentative knock.

  Elizabeth opened the door a sliver. “Oh. It’s Hattie.”

  The young blond woman hurried in, red-cheeked, arms flailing, sweat beaded over her upper lip. “Lord, I think they’re gonna start shootin’ up the place again and James ain’t here to pitch ’em out.”

  Lola got to her feet in a hurry and hustled to the door, regardless of the state of her makeup. No use interrogating the woman. She needed to stop those destructive jackasses from blasting holes into her saloon. The last time there’d been a gunfight in the vicinity, it’d taken her months to scrounge up the funds to fix the outer walls.

  “Stay here,” she said to the women following at her heels down the steps. There wasn’t anything Elizabeth or Hattie could do, and the sound of the shooting was likely to frighten them into their cougar forms again. They were better off staying in the office.

  From the umbrella stand at the landing, Lola grabbed the saber some drunken soldier had deposited and unsheathed it. As she descended to the bottom step, she took stock of the situation. Men were crowded against the dirty saloon windows, shouting at the disturbance forming outside, placing their bets.

  Cowards.

  She shoved through them and o
utside, easily spotted the mass of bodies in the center of the street, punching, kicking, biting. There were at least ten men out there trying to get the upper hand. She didn’t know what the fight was about, but all it took was for one of those idiots to draw a firearm to turn the whole town into the stage of an hours-long shootout. Other than ranching, churchgoing, drinking, and whore-visiting, there wasn’t much else to do in Maria. Some of those “men” would consider the violence a welcome diversion.

  She could get violent, too, if that was what they wanted. Perhaps her conversation with Elizabeth had put her in the mood.

  Through clenched teeth, she snarled, “I’m going to give you all to the count of five to move this ridiculous cock-swinging spectacle away from the front of my goddamned saloon.” She repeated the instructions in Spanish and French, just in case a few of those Louisiana boys had stumbled into town to raise hell again.

  She tapped the sword handle against the awning supports to get their attention. “One.” Louder, she called out, “two.”

  A few men paused mid-punch to look at her, but immediately went back to brawling.

  She breathed out a quiet growl and pondered more aggressive containment methods. She could burn them all just a little and the onlookers inside wouldn’t know a thing.

  Stop that. You don’t do that anymore.

  Besides, Maria’s doctor already had too much work for one man. She wouldn’t do that to him. He’d been kind enough to rent her the building her saloon was in. No one else had wanted her money badly enough.

  Grimacing, she shouted “Three.”

  Not only was she a woman, and Mexican, but she hadn’t been at all discreet about the fact she wouldn’t discourage her employees from making money in any way they could.

  “Four,” she snapped, tightening her grip on the saber. Perhaps they didn’t believe her, but she always made good on her threats.

  A bullet whirred past her right ear.

  Glass shattered behind her.

  More bullets started flying and men started scattering to anywhere they could go to take cover.

  Lola didn’t take cover, though. She stood still, gripping that saber, seeing red.