When he’s dealt the hand, he tips his hat to her. “I’m John Henry Holliday, but most folks call me Doc.”
“And are you a lawman too, Doc?” she asks. Wyatt sets down a glass of whiskey. The glass still has the lip prints of the previous owner on the rim.
“This son of a bitch? He’s a degenerate card player if there ever was one. If you’ll excuse my language, ma’am.”
Doc smiles, and Kate knows it’s an old joke between the men. Even if the smile is stiff, and if Doc’s eyes are more slate than silver when Wyatt laughs at his expense.
“I’m just a faro dealer, ma’am,” he tells her. “At least until the sun goes down.”
Perdition, Arizona
1888
Sunset came and went while Kate walked, and the moon was hung high overhead when she reached the outskirts of Perdition. A small cemetery set outside the town limits was the first hint of civilization. The graves were wooden crosses or nothing at all, just humped dirt where the ground kept its secrets. A white shiny spot in the dirt turned out to be a leg bone, dug up and gnawed by a coyote.
Kate had the Winchester off her back, in her hands, the metal of the lever and the stock warming against her skin. There were sounds in the darkness, at last, and that could only mean she was getting close. Some of them could turn into rats, or wolves. Bugs, bats. Night creatures. Carrion-eaters.
The owl’s call nearly made her scream, and Kate pulled up hard. She was too nervous, too tight. She’d end up shooting herself, or a citizen that still drew breath.
It swooped over the cemetery, dived, and picked up a fat wriggling rat. Its blunt-feathered wings made no sound as it climbed into the night, taking a perch in a cottonwood tree a little ways off.
Kate lowered the rifle. John always said owls watched for lost souls, to capture them and take them on to the netherworld. Said that in Greek mythos, owls were the keepers of the dead, neither harm nor help. They just watched. John was full of such facts, and during a long stage ride or a slow night at the tables, he told her because she listened.
He hadn’t needed to teach her anatomy, though, when she’d found out about his side profession. Her father was a doctor and he made sure his Mary Katharine knew something about the ways a man could bend and break and be sewn back together. Kate knew where to aim and where to shoot.
But Doc taught her the lore, the stories. Without them, you couldn’t hope to understand, not really.
The owl ripped a fat cut from the rat’s belly and swallowed it. Kate grimaced. “I hope it’s one of yours,” she murmured to the dark, and kept walking into town.
“You’re not from Texas,” Doc had said, after they’d spent hours at the faro table talking, when it had gone full dark outside and Kate had given up hope of a job. “You’re from a long way off.”
“I was born in Europe,” she admitted. “Hungary. And you, Mr Holliday – you’re not from Texas either.”
“Valdosta, Georgia,” he admitted, although he ran the words together – Valdostageorgia, with As long and wide as a muddy river. “It seems we have something in common, Miss Kate.” He took a drink from his flask, winked at her. “We neither of us ended up where destiny said we’d be.”
Dodge City, Kansas
1878
Kate knows that something is not right with Doc. She’s never been a particularly suspicious woman and certainly not a jealous one – jealousy is for married women and haggard old spinsters, like the ones that glare at her in the street when she and Doc are out taking the air.
The air in Kansas is thick and wet in summer, full of dust and dancing motes in autumn. Neither one helps Doc’s coughing.
He told Kate the night they met that he was sick, and not to expect him to live any time at all. Kate doesn’t make a habit of expecting anything from anyone, especially not gamblers who move from town to town, trailing their lawman friends like the Romany caravans that rumbled through the streets of Kate’s childhood city.
Because of this, she and Doc have spent over a year together. Expecting nothing, and enjoying most things. He talks to her. He doesn’t treat her like she’s stupid, or even like she’s a woman at times. He tells her stories about hunting fox in the swamps outside Valdosta, about his dentistry practice. He told her about a man who had every one of his teeth pulled while drunk, and made it funny, so that Kate had to hide herself behind her fan. Laughter until you’re red-faced is unladylike.
There’s always money, whiskey and a feather bed at the end of the night, if they go to bed. Doc is a better lover than most before, and what he lacks in consideration he makes up for in ardency. Doc is dying and he grasps on to her like she’s the air that his rotted lungs can’t breathe in.
Kate knows, if she were a different Kate than Big-Nose Kate Elder, woman of no particular skill but possessed of a sharp tongue, were he a different Doc than Doc Holliday, the fastest gunfighter since Bill Hickok, that she’d be in love with him.
But there’s something not right about Doc, and it’s eating Kate away as surely as the tuberculosis is eating at her lover.
That’s why she follows him this time, when he slips out of bed, into a shirt and pants and his favourite overcoat. She waits, breathing slow and even in the dark, while he straps on his twin nickel-plated pistols and tucks a rifle up under his arm.
Doc has been leaving her at night for months, in Texas and in Kansas, and at first Kate, the other Kate, was furious and heartbroken. But she’s never smelled another woman on him, not even the smoke and soot of a gambling house. Never seen anything except tired crescents under his eyes in the morning light.
She’s left on her stockings, and it’s a simple trick to pull on a shirtwaist and skirt, shove her feet into boots, and be after him once the door of their rooming house swings shut.
They’d retired early, Doc tired and pale and not in the mood to engage in couple’s familiarity. Kate remembers the taut feeling of his shoulders as she slipped his jacket off.
“Somebody tried to kill Wyatt tonight,” he says before she can ask.
“Knowing Wyatt, this somebody probably had a reason,” she replies.
“I almost shot a man in the chest, Kate.” Doc slumps on their bed, and she mounts it behind him, wrapping her arms around his torso, pressing her face into the ashy gold hair that smells of pomade. It’s like putting your face into hay, clean and sweet.
“But you didn’t, love,” she tells him.
“But I was ready to,” he says, so quiet it’s difficult to hear over the street noise below their window.
Doc is a few dozen feet ahead of her, walking with purpose through the empty streets. The rifle is under his coat – not even the trusted friend of Marshal Earp can shirk the ordinance against firearms inside the limits of Dodge.
He turns into the shanty town where the Chinamen have their laundries and seamstressing concerns and opium parlours. Kate doesn’t understand opium. Opium makes you stupid, and slow. Kate has learned from Doc the value of being sharp and fast.
Doc passes under someone’s forgotten laundry line, his pale face and hair in shadow for a moment before the moon finds them again. And then he stops, and he turns in a slow circle.
Kate yanks herself into the alcove of a laundry, bags and bundles of clean clothes breathing out scratchy fibres and the scent of lye. He’s almost seen her, and she can’t articulate why, but she knows that Doc seeing her now would ruin something, kick out some foundation their time together is resting on.
Behind Doc, the shadows move.
Kate watches them unfold, grow arms and legs and teeth. The teeth shine under the moonlight, silver and brighter than the polish on Doc’s pistols.
She’s screaming before she can bite her tongue. “John, look out!”
In one motion, Doc raises his rifle, pumps the lever, aims and fires. The shadow drops back and falls to the ground. The shadow is hissing.
Kate moves from her hiding place but Doc stops her. “Stay put!” He draws the pistol from the left sid
e of his belt and points it at the black mass on the ground. The mass that is wearing a man’s clothing and a man’s face, and has teeth like a hungry cougar. Bleeding clotted black blood from a chest wound, but still grinning and hissing.
Doc is a true shot – he doesn’t miss eight times out of ten. He hasn’t missed now. The thing’s heart is shot out. And yet it still bleeds. It still moves. It looks her in the eye.
The pistol speaks, and the thing goes still, collapsing like the laundry sacks piled up under the tents all around them.
Kate doesn’t think she can speak, but she manages. “Is he dead?”
“It.” Doc’s chest is moving like a bellows, short and shallow. “It, not ‘he’. And no . . . ” Doc doubles over, choking, and the spell holding Kate’s feet breaks. She goes to him, rubs the centre of his back like she’s done a hundred times before, waits for the fit to pass.
He stops coughing after a time. Spits the blood at the thing. Its eyes are still open and Kate can’t look any more. There’s something still in there. “It’s looking at me.”
Doc grips her shoulders. “I need something from our room. Can you wait here until I get back?”
Kate can’t answer, can just nod limply. The expression on Doc’s face is scaring her a thousand times more than any living shadow.
Doc is frightened.
“I can.” She sits on an overturned water barrel to demonstrate her fastness.
“If it gets up again . . . ” Doc presses the dead weight of the pistol into her hands. “Aim for the head, and don’t you miss.”
Then he’s gone, a blacker spot on the black night, and Kate is alone with the thing, this shadow-thing that tried to kill her John Henry.
It is a very long time before Doc comes back, and Kate spends every minute in agony, imagining the worst. Her imagination is no match for the truth. But she hasn’t learned the truth of Doc’s nights. Not yet.
Perdition, Arizona
1888
She knew the truth, in the back of her mind. A rivulet of stories from her father, the doctor, caught up with the dime novels she’d read to pass the time on long rides or when Doc and Wyatt were out on men’s affairs, combined into a flash flood with the instinct that lives in every breathing thing, far back, underneath civility and flesh.
Kate knew what the thing on the ground was. When Doc came back with his beaten-up black leather dentist’s kit, she wasn’t surprised. When he took out the wooden spike and the hammer, she didn’t look away even though he told her to.
And when the body on the ground had turned to foul-smelling grey ashes, already starting to scatter on the light wind, she grabbed Doc and slapped him hard, then started to cry.
He held her and whispered in her ear. “You have to understand, Kate. It’s not something I go telling every man, woman and child in creation.”
As the ash blew away and was forgotten, so the companionship of Kate Elder and Doc Holliday began to change. She told him the stories from her father and her father’s grandmother before that, related while she and her sister huddled around the coal fire in Budapest. The vampir, who had their heads cut off and their ashes mixed with holy water to keep their corpses from wandering home again.
Kate had passed the cemetery, and she could see the first sweep of shanties and tents that made up Perdition. There was no movement. Not even wind deigned to stir this forsaken patch of ground. The Winchester was growing sweaty in her grip and her shirtwaist was growing damp against her skin.
This wasn’t a hunting vampire that John shot on the wing. This wasn’t a red-eyed whore feeding on lonely cowboys. Kate didn’t know what waited for her in Perdition.
She just knew that she had to come.
The telegram crackled under her touch as she reached down to check her bullet belt. Every loop a full round, every round tested and true. Just like John’s.
She’d been in Aspen, Colorado when the news had come. It wasn’t unexpected, sudden, a shot and a body falling. She’d been to see him already. She’d made her peace with John Henry Holliday.
Holliday dead. Gone to Perdition. Your svcs needed.
She’d shed her tears and broken her crockery and had her time with that ice-cold empty feeling that came from knowing what she had to do, here in Perdition.
Now it just remained to finish.
John told her stories in return, like he always had, only now they were about how he’d come across a woman in the swamp outside Valdosta one moonlit midnight. How she’d had a little freeman child with her. John was seventeen, but his father was a war veteran twice over and he taught his son to shoot first and think later.
The little girl survived. The woman ran into the swamp, wounded and needing to feed.
Next sundown, she came to the Holliday house with six of her kin. “They can’t cross thresholds,” John had said. “But she sure did put up a howl. Sent the fear of God straight through me.”
He went to the free Negro town across the piney woods from the Hollidays’ snug home in downtown Valdosta, and the little girl’s grandmother told him how her people dealt with vampires.
The next night, Doc was ready.
Kate’s chest clenched when she breathed in, ever so slightly. He’d taught her how to shoot straighter, how to make silver bullets to put them down, what trees to fashion stakes from to kill them.
John had taught her how to survive in a world where things that breathed were little better than cattle.
And he’d died. He’d up and died and left her behind, to pick up his mess and burn it clean and scatter the ashes to the four directions like the Navajo. Four corners, four ways to keep the ghosts of your dead from rising again.
Sound and movement spilled from a saloon at the far end of the street, and Kate wiped her hand down on the rough cotton pants she’d kept in her trunk for nearly five years.
Just in case she ever needed to ride as hard and fast as the devil himself again, to prevent something worse than the devil from rising and walking.
Her hand would be steady and her aim would be sure. She wouldn’t shy away from doing the duty she’d tumbled into that night she’d followed Doc from the rooming house, going on ten years ago now.
Kate steadied her grip on the Winchester, and walked towards the saloon.
Tombstone, Arizona
1881
Tombstone is a young town, birthed from the rock and the sand of Arizona. It does not have a decent milliner’s shop or a single fine dining establishment. The rooming house Doc finds for them on Fremont Street, Fly’s, is barely better than the hovels Kate lived in on her quest down the Mississippi and across the plains to Kansas, but at least there are no bugs and the landlord keeps his remarks about an unmarried couple in a single room to himself. Tombstone has whores in abundance, springing up like flowers from the fertile soil of mining and railroad money.
Because Tombstone also has silver mines. They wind for miles under the earth, deep and dark and cramped. The perfect hiding place for a creature that cannot face the sun.
Kate has cleaned a nest before – the weight of the kerosene jug tugs on her arm as she and Doc venture into the mine. They are twelve miles from Tombstone, creeping down a vent tunnel in the Graveyard Mine. “A more apt name I’ve never heard,” Doc mutters as they move through the dim and the dust. “The bastard who laid this claim had the devil’s own humour.”
His lantern doesn’t pierce much more than ten feet ahead, and he needs his other hand free to put down anything that might be moving in this forgotten section of ground. So Kate carries the kerosene, the matches, the spikes and the mallet.
Silver will paralyse a vampire, but only fire or a piercing of the heart will kill it. It seems like they’re mocking her, Kate thinks as they walk, by living so close to the very thing that can leave them helpless.
Kate has a Winchester strapped across her back, and a knife dipped in silver in the belt of her man’s trousers. The mine is hot, and sweat works its way down her neck and over her ribs in a parod
y of Doc’s touch.
“It’s easy for them in a place like this,” he says from ahead of her. “A man dies in a whore’s bed, it’s drink or vice that did him in. A whore dies in the street, it’s what she had coming from on high. The marshal’s more concerned with keeping the breathers from shooting each other over claims and the rest of them are so blinded by silver they wouldn’t notice if one walked into the smithy and asked to have its fangs filed.”
“Even Wyatt?” Kate says. Wyatt knows that Doc is a gambler and that Kate is his woman. He doesn’t know about the midnight assignations. He doesn’t know what watches him from the dark places.
“Especially Wyatt,” Doc says. His tone of late is flat and angry when Wyatt comes up. Kate knows that Wyatt has given up law and taken up speculating. He’s become angrier and more inclined to cuff a drunkard than escort him out of Earp’s preferred saloon. Wyatt and Doc’s friendship is strained in this silver-veined, lawless place. The vampires don’t provide a help.
They’ve spread among the whores like syphilis, and Kate has put a stake through the heart of no less than three soiled doves in their four months at Tombstone. The nest will be the end of it, killing the disease rather than a symptom, Kate hopes.
She’s gotten stronger in the time she’s been with Doc. Smarter, too. Vampires are like a creeping rash on the face of the night. They can be burned and destroyed, but they always come crawling back. And they come to Doc, like moths to a lantern. Fierce as his reputation is among the daylight denizens of the frontier, it’s worse among the night creatures. All of them want a pound of flesh from the hide of Doc Holliday.
The lantern lights up pine boxes, crude coffins slapped together from knotty wood still oozing pitch. Tucked up against the earth, like mushrooms sprouting from a dead man’s skin.
Doc sets the lantern down and, as he does, Kate catches sight of a pale hand in the dirt. “John Henry. There.”
He bends and checks the girl’s throat – one of the Chinese girls who smiles at Kate when she takes in their washing – and shakes his head. “She’s dry.”
Love Bites UK (Mammoth Book Of Vampire Romance2) Page 12
