“Damn it, Pat,” Brewer said. “How we gonna fight all of ‘em? There are only nine of us.”
“So far,” Pat said, long legs stretched toward the fire. “You’ll get more.”
“Besides, we got the tools,” I said, touching my belt, which now held more weapons than just guns.
“That’s still not enough to put a dent in a mob this size,” Brewer pointed out before taking a drink from the canteen.
“Brick by brick, boys,” Pat said, leaning back, his elbows resting on his rolled blanket. “We just have to take them out one by one. We do that, steadily and with care, and we’ll send ‘em packin’.”
The sound of a howling wolf pierced the night air, and we all went still. The days of fearing a simple wolf were long past. Now we all feared it could be something larger and more dangerous: a werewolf.
I pulled my gun with its silver bullets and spit the toothpick I’d been chewing into the fire. “Let’s do a sweep of the area, Brewer.”
Dick handed Garrett back the canteen and took off his hat, setting it by his bedding. “Sounds far off. Let’s not assume―”
“He’s right,” Pat said, standing up, his eyes looking from me to the burning toothpick. “Gentlemen don’t spit things out, Billy.”
“Piss off, Pat,” I said with a smirk on my face. “Now let’s go take a look, shall we?”
Dick grabbed his weapons. “I do not have a good feelin’ about this.”
“So noted. Take your lamps, and I’ll go alert the others,” Pat said, and headed over to the chuck wagon as Dick and me spread out.
I grabbed my Regulator-issued bahvah-lamp from my belt. Each one was a different shape and size, made from a stone called honeycomb calcite and roughly the size of the fist of the man it was given to. Holding up the yellow stone with white lines running through it, I said, “Luminaire.” Touched by witch magic, the rock brightened up the dark, glowing from within itself.
We’d not been looking long when Dick yelled out, “I think I found somethin’.”
I walked on over to him adding my light to his to stare down at an enormous paw print.
“What’d I tell ya?” I said with a grin.
Dick grunted. “Why are you always right?”
“It’s a curse,” I said and winked. “Get it?”
Dick’s face went flat. “That’s not funny.”
“Oh, come on, it’s a little funny.”
“Can you take nothin’ seriously? Not even the fate of your soul?”
Standing up, I smiled and said, “Awe, come on now, Dick, you know―”
A bullet hit me in the chest, causing words to fail me as I fell to my knees.
“Billy!” Brewer yelled, but before he could check on me, something enormous and hairy tackled him, knocking his bahvah-lamp to the ground.
My chest burned like Hell itself had taken up residence inside as I rolled over to face Brewer, now farther away. Lifting my gun, I took aim on the enormous beast, whose teeth snapped mere inches from my friend’s neck.
“Stop movin’ and I’ll shoot the thing!” I shouted.
Two other men from our group jumped into the fight, giving Brewer the chance to clock the beast in the jaw with a set of silver-plated iron knuckles he’d been wearing.
“Stop movin’? I don’t think so! Shoot the bastard!” Dick said, dodging the creature.
I focused on the four of them, worried the wolf’s speed would cause me to hit a friend, but I fired, and the training paid off. The beast wailed and fell. As he did, I felt a surge of energy and could stand. Doing so, I drew my second gun as the thing attacked Brewer again.
Walking toward the hairy monster, everything went into slow motion. I could see teeth, silver, blood, and sweat flying this way and that, but aiming now wasn’t difficult. I emptied both of my weapons with precise accuracy into the werewolf, taking his life.
A rush of energy like I’d never known flowed into me, numbing the pain in my chest completely as we watched the creature’s horrific change. The wolf’s bones began to shift under the skin as the fur vanished, leaving behind a naked, dead, human man. Everyone stood in shock, staring at him, as another bullet whizzed by, causing us to remember there could be more out there that wanted us dead and didn’t walk on four legs.
“I’m empty! Brewer, your rifle!” I yelled out.
Without hesitation, Dick threw his Winchester to me. I grabbed it mid-air with ease and turned to fire into the night, which didn’t appear so dark anymore. Bullets flew toward us, and everyone else took cover, but I was too wired to even consider it.
Heading toward the gunman—I could see him now as clear as day—I fired two more times. The first was so close that it burned by his hand, causing him to drop the gun, while the second hit him in the head. Again, energy flooded my being, and this time, I had to rest a hand on my knee to catch my breath from it.
Cheers went up all around, and Pat came running toward me, Dick close on his heels.
“He was shot!” Dick told him. “We need to make sure he’s not bleedin’ out, seeing as he’s acting like a loon. What were you thinking, walking out in the open toward a man with a gun?”
I stood, feeling a bit drunk, and handed the rifle to someone. “I had a gun, too.” When Dick just glared at me, I said, “I don’t know. I just saw him so clearly that I thought I’d take him out.”
“See him? This far from the fire, almost no moon, and without bahvah-lamp? It’s pitch black out here,” Dick pointed out.
I looked around and the night was anything but dark. The stars and the sliver of moon seemed to light up the sky like the sun was already on the horizon. I would’ve said so, but just then I noticed that Pat had his hands all over my chest, hunting for something. “What in tarnation are ya doin’, Pat?”
“I can’t find the wound the bullet made,” Pat explained.
“Let’s take him near the fire,” Dick ordered. “Besides, there could be more comin’.”
Pat got an arm around me. “Not tonight there won’t be. A one man, one wolf team is a typical scouting party. We should be good for the rest of the night but stay alert.”
He and Dick helped me back, forcing me to sit on a wooden supply box close to the fire so they could look at my chest. As Dick pulled off my coat, Pat sent all the other men to take care of the bodies, except Fred and Charlie, being that Fred had gotten a bit tipsy one night and told him about my curse.
“There! He’s got blood on his right side,” Dick pointed out.
“He sure does,” Fred confirmed.
Pat unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it open whilst I protested like a drunkard, swatting at his hands but without enough conviction to do anything.
“I don’t get it,” Charlie said. “There’s blood but no wound.”
Dick sat on Pat’s sudan, obviously babying his left arm, his face the epitome of confusion.
“Are you okay, Dick?” I asked.
He ignored my question. “Pat, how is that possible? There’s blood. He was obviously hit.”
Fred untucked my shirt and something plopped onto my boots. Hearing it, Pat leaned over and picked up the item. Lifting it into the firelight, I saw that he held a forty-five-caliber bullet.
“It seems the curse has fully set in,” Pat said quietly. “If you didn’t believe me before, you should now.”
“What are you babblin’ about?” I looked down where I’d felt the fiery pain earlier to find my shirt soaked with blood but not a mark on my flesh at all. “Uh, Pat?”
Garrett eased down to sit next to Brewer but addressed me. “How soon after you were shot did you wound the werewolf?”
“Pretty quick,” Dick answered first.
“I suppose,” I agreed. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I only know one other like you,” Pat explained. “I thought the affliction was just for him. But it seems not. Must be all her heroes.”
“Affliction?” I asked.
“The minute you mortally woun
ded your first werewolf, it must’ve set in,” Pat said.
“I’m not injured. Isn’t that a good thing?”
“You feel light headed?” When I nodded, Pat said, “You take on the human life force of each demon you eliminate: a small amount upon injury, the whole enchilada upon death. It’ll always heal you, rejuvenate your body. Once used, that soul will cross over, released from Scáthach’s grasp.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, my mind beginning to clear up and stop spinning.
“The other man I know like you, his name is Tom,” Garrett said. “He hasn’t aged a day since he started killin’ demons. He told me that until he rids the Earth of Scáthach or kills all the monsters she personally made the year she cursed him, he cannot let himself die.”
“What if he stops killin’ ‘em? The demons, that is,” Dick asked.
“If he’s used up all the souls in him, he can age and die...but there’s no promise that he’ll have killed enough demons to save his soul, for he sacrificed it for this gift,” Pat explained.
Horrified, I said, “I did no such thing!”
“Are you sure, Billy?” Fred asked, staring at my freshly healed skin.
“The absorption of their energy is why you were able to see in the dark as well as they do. You take on some of their supernatural powers when you take their soul.”
“Such as?” Dick asked as I sat there numb.
“Other than better sight? Strength, hearin’, longevity, flexibility, and stamina.”
“That would explain why he could see better in the jail hole,” Fred said. “He’d injured that wolf.”
“And his extra strength and instincts came because he was near one as it changed,” Pat added.
What they were saying made sense, in its way, but one thing stuck in my craw. “But I’ve been aging just fine since I met Mary.”
Pat frowned. “You’d not killed a demon yet.”
“Why didn’t you tell him any of this before?” Dick demanded to know, and I could hear the indignation in his tone.
“I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he was a warrior of Scáthach. Tunstall was the one who believed. He had the natural instinct to spot your kind, Billy. Just like his dad. It’s a shame John was lost to the cause so early on.”
Heated anger lit my brain for multiple reasons, one of which I wasn’t willing to confront. The other I let loose on Pat with abandon. “Lost to the cause? Is that what you think?”
I stood and paced to the other side of the fire. “How about murdered in cold blood on the orders of a little man who drinks like a fish and has a temper the size of Texas just because he was mad about an article in the paper? Dolan, and Murphy too for that matter, see themselves as demagogues who have to have the last word and always get their way. You knew that, yet you sent John here unprotected?”
“He had you all,” Garrett said.
Those four words stung my heart to a level that they took my words away as I swallowed down the bile rising in my throat.
“That was out of line,” Fred told Pat, his eyes on Brewer, who sat with his head in his hands.
Seeing this, anger flamed in my chest the size of a forest fire, and I ran at Garrett. Grabbing his shirt in one hand, I yanked him to me as I jumped to stand on the box I’d been sitting on before. “How dare you! Like McSween hasn’t already made Dick feel like it was his fault, you have to go and throw accusations around like that? Fuck you, Garrett. You and your club of Regulators in England. You damn well knew John should’ve had protection! Someone who knew the truth of what was going on, but instead you left us in the dark, and now he’s dead. You get to own that, not me, and definitely not Brewer.”
Unable to get much air due to my hold on him, Garrett wheezed in what he could. “His assigned Regulator Network Liaison never returned from La Mesilla.”
“His what?” Dick asked.
I let up on my hold a bit and Garrett continued. “There’s a team trained to assist Regulators with communication and protection. They’re called Regulator Network Liaisons, and each Regulator, or group of them, gets one, but John’s never got here. We assumed he was killed in the line of duty, and another was dispatched as soon as John let us know. However, that replacement is still on his way here, and he’s the top of his class. I know because I picked him out myself for you all.”
“Well, their best candidate can’t do anythin’ if he ain’t here!” I shouted, feeling the extra strength of the soul energy still inside me and knew if I wanted to, I could crush Pat’s windpipe with one hand, and I wanted to. I desperately needed to make someone hurt like I did.
“Billy, let him go,” Dick said, his voice low and soft in a way that told me he understood my fury and pain. “You can’t kill him; we need him.”
“The hell we do,” I said, but even I could hear the waver of my conviction in that statement.
“Billy,” Charlie said. “Take a breath.”
“If he’d only been truthful with us from the start!” I said, pangs of guilt thumping hard in my chest for Tunstall, but I did what Charlie said, and the red at the edges of my vision faded. I let go of Garrett with a shove that sent him sprawling onto the damp ground a good ten feet from us as the sun slid up over the horizon.
Fred Waite placed his hand on my arm. “Billy, maybe you should...”
I looked around and saw all the other Regulators standing there. My eyes landed first on Henry Brown, then slid down the line to Josiah “Doc” Scurlock, “Big Jim” French, José Chavez y Chavez, “Tiger Sam” Smith, and John Middleton. I had no idea how long they had been watching, but it’d been long enough to hear the argument and see me throw a man a foot taller than me farther than I should’ve been able to.
Without a word, I jumped down and ran off. I needed time to think without Pat in my face or any of my friends staring at me like I was a leper. I headed into the trees, and as soon as I found one good for climbing, I scaled up her with ease and sat on a branch overlooking the land as the New Mexico sky turned colors only she could . With pinks, purples, blues, and oranges, the sun painted the sky as it began to rise, throwing light onto the world again.
I sat in such a way that I couldn’t see the others. I didn’t want to be able to watch them when what I needed was to focus on what I saw inside myself. My mind whirled, trying to not only comprehend what had just happened, but how. When had I willingly handed the ownership of my soul to Mary? I couldn’t remember. It must’ve been a trick on her part. I couldn’t imagine I’d have ever wanted to not grow up. At the age of fourteen, that’s all you want: to be an adult. Now I never would.
The truth of this sank into me. I was gonna outlive all my friends and have to watch them die just like I had my mom and Tunstall. It was either that or I would be forfeiting my soul and never see either of them again. The pain of this twisted my gut as I watched the sun take to the sky with the moon.
Usually the moon was alone in the sky, just like I had been since I ran away from Silver City. But then I, too, had been joined by the sun. An educated man with ambition saw promise in me, and just like that, a group of men, as well as many in the town of Lincoln, embraced me. They made me feel for the first time since my momma died that I had family.
Now I would lose them all. People would learn the truth and run, or even if they didn’t, time would take them from me. Whether by choice or not, everyone I loved would leave me, again, just like everyone else in my life had so far: my father, mother, stepfather, brother, John...and Mary. What had she done and how?
I groaned, my thoughts coming full circle. Leaning back, I closed my eyes just as my stomach growled. Did I take the chance of rejection by heading back now, or did I wait, giving those who were scared of what I was a chance to slink off?
“Screw that!” I said, jumping down from the tree and landing on my feet without so much as a twinge of pain. “If they want to run from me like scared bitches, they can be forced to explain that to my face. I’m not gonna make it easy on ‘em. Not one bit!�
�
I stormed down the mountain and into our camp to find everyone calmly eating breakfast, which brought me up short. Conversations halted as they saw me. I stood there, my emotions a hodgepodge mixture of surprise and anger at the events that’d happened as well as things yet to come. With no idea what to say, I counted heads. Nine. We were missing one. Garret wasn’t here. I spun to look for his horse, and it was gone, too.
“He felt you would calm down more if he let you be,” Fred said, standing up. Setting his tin plate down, he walked over to me. “He left something for you on your bedroll. Oh, and he explained the truth to everyone before he left.”
“And yet, you’re all still here?” I asked, confused.
“We all took a magically sealed oath with some spell Garrett had from a witch,” Fred said.
“About me?”
Fred grinned. “Yes, you. Well, you, John, his family...England...the whole thing.”
Josiah Scurlock, nicknamed “Doc” because he’d been a dentist at some point, making the fact that he was missing his two front teeth hilariously ironic, stepped forward. “Why would you think we would leave, Billy?”
I looked at Doc, with his big ears that stuck out from a head that held the brain of a professor, and said, “Because I’m a cursed being who doesn’t even own his own soul.”
“Or maybe you have a soul but someone else holds the deed and you’ve got to get it back.”
I nodded at Doc. I liked that better. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as horrible sounding either. “And everyone knows and is okay with it?”
“Yes, and they are still here,” Dick said as he stood. “We’ve got your back no matter what. Now get some food in you so we can go home. Moon sets about an hour before noon, and I wanna be on the road by then.”
My eyes locked on his, and I saw the truth there. Though they all wore their acceptance of me on their faces, it was Dick Brewer who held my gaze. With personal understanding of loss oozing from every pore and an empathy for me that seemed to sit at his very core, I knew I wasn’t alone in all this. Then, like the day Tunstall hired me, I swelled with pride and happiness.
The Curse of Billy the Kid: Untold Legends Volume One Page 5
