by Mimi Riser
Neither of them noticed her trailing them. Their focus was locked on the scene ahead and the battle to control their stomachs as the sight and stench of charred flesh grew more atrocious the closer they drew to it. All four corpses were mutilated beyond what the fire could account for. Body parts were missing. It appeared they’d been tortured before being burned.
An act of vengeance? A way to relieve the tedium of a dull night on the prairie? Neither of Kathy’s suggestions worked for Tabitha. Only a madman could do such things. A violent new wave of nausea struck. She suddenly found herself wondering where, exactly, Alan was and what he’d been doing these past two days and nights.
Kathy stopped to scan the corrals. Her spine went rigid. “We’re in big trouble,” she whispered. “Whoever did this is still here—and there may be a whole hornets nest of them. Less than half of these horses belong to the Garcias.”
Following her gaze, Tabitha felt the blood in her veins freeze to ice. Even from a dozen yards off, she could see that many of the milling horses bore what she remembered as the MacAllister brand. If that wasn’t enough, right in the thick of them danced and snorted an all too familiar giant Appaloosa stallion.
The bottom dropped straight out of her. It wasn’t until that moment, when she saw the proof, that she realized how desperately she had wanted to not believe it, how fiercely she had hoped she was wrong about him. If she really had been the suicidal type, she might have tested her marksmanship against her own skull right then, simply to end the overwhelming sense of loss that slammed through her, nearly knocking her to her knees.
But she wasn’t the type. If nothing else, she was too stubborn for it. Also suddenly too enraged. A series of wild shots shattered the air. And with them, and old man’s agonized pleas for mercy, and a baby’s hysterical screams.
“That’s Rosa! Oh, dear God— Noooo!” Kathy raced toward the largest shed, whipping out her second revolver as she went.
Tabitha sped after her. But both were overtaken and passed by the practically fire breathing Esmeralda, who charged forward like a one-horse cavalry. Or perhaps, in the need of the moment, she had agreed to be Petunia again? A steely-eyed figure lay low in the saddle, clinging to her neck like a blond leech.
Or a wizard?
“Both of you, stay back!” Simon ordered as he galloped past.
“That idiot is going to get himself killed!” Kathy put on an extra burst of speed and tore forward.
“We’re all going to get ourselves killed,” Tabitha groaned, instinct throwing her flat as she rounded the open front of the three-sided shed.
Blinded by dust, shots blazing over her head, shouts ringing in her ears, she snaked belly down over the hard-packed earth, her direction guided only by the higher pitched notes of the baby’s wild shrieks. A spray of bullets tore up the ground to her right. Without thinking, she rolled left, firing off one shot toward something she could barely see.
Good heavens, it worked!
The something yelped and sat down hard, dropping his weapon to clutch at what was left of his kneecap.
More shots sounded from another direction. Whether they were aimed at her or not, Tabitha didn’t know and didn’t wait to find out. Rolling again, she was brought up short against a cool sticky mound—and suffered a near coronary when she realized the mound was the naked bodies of Carmen Garcia and her two older daughters, stacked together like bloody cordwood. It didn’t take a lot of guesswork to figure what had been done to them before death. The bottom corpse was still staked spread-eagled to the ground. Tabitha could feel the lash wounds on all three females almost as if the bullwhips that made them had bit into her.
Battling back cold horror, she scrabbled sideways, squinting into the rising sun’s glare and trying to get her bearings. Somehow she had ended up to the west and almost thirty feet away from her original destination: the open side of the long, south-facing shed, where the baby’s cries were coming from—although the erratic shrieks had leveled out into an unbroken stream of forceful wailing. Little Rosa had good lungs, apparently. That was something at least, Tabitha thought, with a few seconds of relief. Wails like that were from fright and anger, not actual pain.
Which was more than could be said for the man she had shot. He lay where the bullet had dropped him, squealing like a stuck pig. Even his cohorts were giving him a wide berth. Three of them were grappling for a hold on Esmeralda’s bridle, while four more were trying to drag her rider out of the saddle.
Tabitha glanced over her shoulder toward the scene just as Simon hit the dirt beneath them. But before she could attempt any aid, a burst of gunfire cracked out from between two bales of hay at the east side of the yard, driving three of his attackers backward several paces. He sent the remaining one even farther with a sledgehammer fist to the jaw, and dove behind the hay, leaving Esmeralda to her own fight.
Were those bales where Kathy had taken cover, Tabitha wondered, the enraged mare’s screams adding a glass shattering harmony to the other cries in her ears.
“I thought I told you to stay out of this!” Simon’s angry bellow sounded over them all.
“You’re welcome!” Kathy’s voice blazed back.
Yep, that’s where she was.
And those two will have to take care of themselves for the moment.
Tabitha flattened herself into the rusty earth and began a torturous belly crawl toward Rosa’s howls still ringing out of the shed. No more bullets had come her way since that first blast on entering the yard, and she’d just guessed why.
In her brown and tan, dust-stained clothes, she was almost invisible, so long as she stayed down. Except for the gunman she’d already incapacitated, no one—probably not even Simon or Kathy—knew she was here. And with a little luck, she hoped to get Rosa out and away before anyone did know it. All the attention seemed currently on corralling the prize mare. Except the mare seemed more intent on demonstrating, with a vengeance, exactly why she was such a prize.
Amid the chaos of shouts and yells and scattered shots, Tabitha heard something that sounded like a basket of eggs being stomped on, and instantly buried her face in the dirt. Someone’s skull had just been split open by a flashing hoof. His brains had landed inches from her nose.
Choking back bile, she made a scrambled detour around them, forcing herself to look a nothing but her destination as she dragged forward over the rough ground, bit by painful bit. Between the glare and the dust and the smoke, it was difficult to see, but something was definitely moving by the side of the shed. She prayed it was only an animal. Sometimes prayers are answered.
And sometimes they’re not.
Tabitha’s heart nearly stopped cold with the rest of her as a tall, black haired figure stepped out into the light and halted in obvious scorn at the fiasco with the mare raging before him. With the early sun in her eyes, she couldn’t make out his face, but she didn’t need to. Moccasins, leggings, breechclout… And above them, that perfectly sculpted torso. There was no doubting who it was.
Yes, he would be scornful of such bungling.
From what she had learned of him so far, he didn’t have much use for others’ incompetence, and the word patience wasn’t even in his vocabulary. But what did he expect with trash like these for followers. He had to be their leader, of course. He wasn’t the type to take orders, only issue them. What was he playing at here? In his madness, did he view this horror as a way of recreating his own private Comanche raiding party?
A real Comanche would be revolted.
Tabitha knew she was. But maybe it was a good thing, after all, that she’d been able to witness what he was capable of. As ghastly as it was to consider that, at least it had set her free from all the other emotions that had been stewing within her these past several days. Gazing up at him, her cheek pressed painfully into the rocky earth, the only emotions she could summon were utter disgust for him, and anger at herself for having ever felt anything else.
Perhaps she moved then. She didn’t think so, but s
omething drew his attention. His head turned, and he seemed to stare straight at her. Heart racing, she held her breath until she risked passing out. But he must only have been looking at something nearby, or some point over her head, because just as her eyes were about to pop from the strain, he pivoted and strode off.
With a ragged gasp, Tabitha went limp in the dust and gave in to several seconds of silent, violent sobs. She had never dreamed a person could feel such intense, soul shattering relief. Not relief that he hadn’t spotted her.
Relief that he wasn’t Alan.
If the man’s face had ever been handsome, cruelty had long since turned its features hard and grim. The jaw was too rigid, the expression of the eyes and mouth too severe, and the nose… There was little of that left. Just a stub of the bridge over two gaping holes surrounded by puckered scar tissue. As grisly as he looked, however, she could almost have hopped up and kissed him, simply for not being Alan.
That was her first unthinking, all feeling response. Her second, more cerebral reaction was to consider that the MacAllister horses in the Garcia corrals had, perhaps, been rustled by these walking dung heaps, and the reason Alan had left in such a temper was because he’d been heading out after horse thieves. That made a certain sense. It also made her flush so hot she marveled the earth didn’t scorch beneath her. Remembering his departure had reminded her of his parting kiss. Which segued into all the prior ones.
Third and finally, she thought that none of this explained away any of her original fears. Just because Alan wasn’t responsible for these crimes, didn’t mean he was innocent of all others.
Realizing, with a shudder, that she was right back where she’d started from, Tabitha raised up slightly, glanced about to make sure no one was looking in her direction, then leapt to her feet and sprinted the last several yards to the shed. All other concerns had been knocked aside by a sudden, ominous hole in the din.
Why had Rosa stopped crying?
Because her grandfather, Servando Garcia, had requested her silence while he prayed to St. Jude, the patron of lost causes. Who had, apparently, heard—thereby restoring Tabitha’s faith in prayer. Even if she, herself, was the answer to this one. The real stunner of the situation was how the man managed to get words out at all. She didn’t think she’d be able to solve that mystery if she lived to be older than he was.
Small, frail, half blinded by cataracts, and crippled by arthritis to begin with, he had been severely beaten, and crucified against the west wall of the shed by a wicked looking stiletto through each palm. She had no way of knowing it then (and it probably wouldn’t have made much difference to her if she had), but the razor sharp blades were his own. Servando, before the cataracts and arthritis, had been known far and wide as one ace of a knife thrower.
It was simple hard luck that his reputation had outlasted his skill. If he had been able to give his family’s tormentors the show they had demanded, perhaps they would have let him and Rosa live, as they had said they would. He didn’t really think so, but then, one never knew, he explained to the stricken looking muchacho who wanted to free him.
It was surprising, and a bit more hard luck perhaps, that the young Mexican could understand little of what he said, but Servando was philosophic enough to accept that. What he could not tolerate was being released while his angelita was swinging from a roof beam like the prize in a turkey shoot.
Switching from Spanish to broken English, he insisted that the child must be freed first. He was so furiously adamant about it, Tabitha rushed to oblige, though it had seemed to her that Rosa would be safe enough in her rope harness for another few seconds.
But it wasn’t merely an old man’s whim. Servando had his reasons. Scarcely was Rosa in Tabitha’s arms, with her own fastened around the strange muchacho’s neck in an amazing stranglehold for a tiny tot, when one of the reasons showed up. It had bad teeth, worse breath, and a sawed-off shotgun in its filthy hands. Staring down the double barrel, Tabitha had to lock her knees to keep them from buckling out from under her. With her own revolver tucked into the waistband of her britches, and Rosa plastered against her like wallpaper, she was in an extremely poor position to argue with such a reason.
“Whal now, ’migo, how’d we miss yew?” he drawled, a congenial leer showing off his broken teeth to their best advantage.
“Que? No hablo inglés, señor,” she mumbled, stalling for time and hoping like heck the man didn’t speak Spanish, because she’d just used up the bulk of hers.
She never found out if he was bilingual or not. But she did have to execute some fancy footwork to keep herself and Rosa from being flattened by him as he crashed forward, his leer fixed forever on his crooked lips, and a long, thin blade buried to the hilt in the base of his skull.
How…
Staring wildly over Rosa’s dark curls, Tabitha saw Servando still hanging from the wall by one hand. The other hand he had unbelievably managed to drag free, along with its stiletto. And it appeared that he had not lost his skill, after all.
“Vamanos, amigo!” he breathed, and died with a look of peaceful satisfaction on his battered old face.
Fortunately, vamanos was one of the Spanish terms Tabitha knew. Not that she really needed the urging. Shifting her sobbing burden a little to the side so she could draw her revolver, and choking back a ragged sob of her own, she hurried down the shadowy length of the long shed to something she wished she’d spotted earlier. It could have saved her that tortuous belly crawl over the jagged terrain in front. But better late than never, she thought, kneeling before the rough hole at the east corner of the back wall.
It wasn’t very large, and climbing through proved more ticklish than she’d anticipated, mainly because Rosa refused to be disengaged even for a minute. The operation took some careful calculating, a lot of breath holding, and a fevered prayer to St. Jude, but they arrived on the opposite side of the shed in one intact unit, having gotten stuck only twice in the process.
That was when Tabitha discovered she was up the proverbial creek in a leaky canoe. And she had just lost her paddle. Or, rather, she had just lost the other three members of her rescue team, which amounted to the same thing.
There was the double-burdened Esmeralda racing pell-mell past the corrals and toward the knoll, with only a halfhearted scattering of shots for pursuit. She had no idea how Simon had finagled the escape, and didn’t bother trying to figure it out. Chalk it up to wizardry.
It was obvious why he’d done it, though. Even viewing them from a distance, she could tell that the smaller figure on the mare was slumped drunkenly askew and held in the saddle only by the strong arms of the larger one.
Heaven help her, Kathy was wounded!
“He had to get her away; it couldn’t be helped,” Tabitha told herself, staring at the rapidly diminishing black spot as if it were the last train out of town, and she had just missed it. Which she had.
But she didn’t think he had meant to abandon her. Whatever else he was—and Kathy had been full of tales about the surprising Smoke Elliott on their moonlit ride—the man was definitely no coward. He hadn’t even seen her in the yard. He probably thought she was securely hidden somewhere, and was planning on coming back with help once Kathy was safe.
Realizing that, however, didn’t make Tabitha feel any less like a deserted and sinking ship. A wretched sensation that was made worse by the guilty awareness she ought to be more concerned about Kathy, who had become such a close friend in such a short time. Hell, part of her was worried about Kathy. Very worried.
But the rest of her was huddled low in the dust with a helpless toddler in her arms and a bloodthirsty band of prairie pirates breathing down her neck. And that was all. There was nowhere she could turn for aid. Rosa had her to depend on, but the buck stopped there. Tabitha had no one but herself to see them both through this.
Having decided that, she suddenly felt calmer, and her pounding pulse slowed to only double its normal rate. It was always good to know exactly where you
stood, she told herself. This way she wouldn’t waste valuable energy wishing for some knight-errant to ride in and save the day. They never turned out to be what you hoped they were, anyway.
“Hush, silencio, niña,” she whispered, stroking Rosa’s curls and rocking her. The toddler’s sobbing had been climbing up the scale to the danger decibel, but she quieted quickly, bringing a lump to Tabitha’s throat at the realization of how much the tiny girl trusted her. She really didn’t deserve such confidence. It was hardly more than luck that had gotten her this far, and she couldn’t expect that luck to last much longer.
It seemed to give out right then, in fact, as the entire homestead violently erupted in blasts and shouts, like the splitting open of Mount Vesuvius—minus the lava. There were churning clouds of dust instead, lit fiery orange by the early sun at their backs as they swept in from the east. Tabitha hadn’t seen them before, because her focus had been on Esmeralda galloping away to the north, but the bandits apparently had. Which was probably how Simon had been able to wrangle his escape in the first place, she realized, squinting feverishly into the center of the leading cloud.
Even with the sun in her eyes, there was no mistaking him this time. What an amazing double irony. To get what you needed just when it was past hoping for, and to be so grateful to see the very thing you’d been fleeing. Lancelot himself could never have looked better or been more welcome. Her luck was still with her.
Or was it?
Biting back a scream, Tabitha leapt up from her crouch when Alan abruptly dropped from his mount’s back. He’d been hit!
“Nooooo…” Without thinking, she pulled Rosa closer and raced straight for the thick of the shooting, then skidded up breathless, staring in dumbfounded relief. The Comanche braves in Dr. Earnshaw’s adventure tales had sometimes done this, but she had never quite believed those tales. She still wasn’t sure she believed them.
