The Gunslinger's Man

by Helena Maeve

  “You imagined ’em,” Wesley muttered.

  Connie sighed. “He’s got his back up ’cause you were right.”

  This was news to Asher. “How do you mean?” he asked, tugging a hand over his face to banish the last tendrils of sleep.

  Halloran’s warm, gravelly voice would take longer to excise from memory.

  “We shouldn’t have come here. Moreau’s just like the others.”

  “We don’t know that,” Asher said. In an attempt to soothe, he reached for one of Connie’s hands and clasped it tightly in his. “Could be mayor’s just a bit put off to hear where we came from.”

  “You don’t buy that.”

  “’Course he doesn’t,” Wesley snapped. “We’ve been locked up for hours while some bloodsucker figures out what to do with us. Other than it being just another Tuesday for our Asher here, it ain’t exactly the safe haven we was hopin’ for, is it?”

  “It’s not his fault—”

  “Aw, shit,” Wesley groaned, steamrolling Connie’s attempt to speak up. “Here he comes.”

  Asher and Connie hurried to join him in the window, but they could barely catch a glimpse of Redemption’s mayor before he disappeared under the porch roof. Moreau wasn’t alone, Asher noted, a beat before a curiously demure knock rang through the suite door.

  Uncle Howard jolted awake at the sound, his glasses threatening to slip off his nose. “What—what’s happening?”

  “Visitors,” Asher murmured under his breath. Then, a little louder, “Come in.”

  The door swung open to reveal Moreau in the same brown shirt and pants he’d worn behind the saloon bar. With his wide, beaming grin, he looked no older than eighteen. No more menacing, either.

  Vampires could be deceptive that way.

  “So sorry for the suspense, ladies and gentlemen. Trust you find our hospitality acceptable so far?” he asked, tucking his thumbs into his suspenders.

  “You’re very kind,” Asher managed tepidly.

  “Mm… Of course, where you’re from, I suppose you’d have been locked in with the cattle.” Moreau sauntered deeper into the room, his coterie fanning out behind him.

  Asher counted two familiar faces among the three Moreau had brought with him. He had seen the women at Ambrose’s, both decked out in taffeta and lace, their hair pinned with gleaming combs that caught the gaslight. Here they wore nondescript, rough-spun frocks with demure collars, hair bound into unassuming plaits which hung over their bony shoulders.

  “Ah, yes. You must be wondering why my friends are here.” Moreau smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “While I’m tempted to keep you here and find out all I can about Sargasso’s defenses, I can’t deny my Christian duty. Y’all deserve a good night’s rest. And some food, by the looks of you. Victoria and Lucretia will take good care of you gentlemen. As for you, Miss…?”

  “Pinkham,” Connie put in, voice a tad shaky.

  “Miss Pinkham,” Moreau repeated, drawing out the second syllable. I’ve got every confidence you’ll find Ivan more than adequate company—”

  “She ain’t going nowhere without one of us,” Wesley barked, caution thrown firmly to the wind.

  Ivan arched his eyebrows, though his features remained otherwise perfectly immobile. He was a beanpole of a man with inky black hair shot with white, and a hook nose. He reminded Asher of no one so much as Malachi, provided Ambrose had waited another fifteen years to give him the bite and imparted a few punches beforehand.

  “Ms. Pinkham will be perfectly safe with Ivan,” said Moreau, the smile gone from his plush lips.

  Asher heard the warning in his voice. “We have your word?” He shushed Wesley’s noise of protest.

  “Of course.” Moreau put out a hand. “If it makes you feel any better, you can spend the night in my lodgings. I live just across down the lane from Ivan’s.”

  It had the allure of an offer, but Asher had spent enough time around vampires to know there was no such thing. Not for humans, anyway.

  He nodded.

  “Ms. Pinkham.” Ivan held out a skeletal hand.

  Connie sucked in a breath and placed her palm in his. The last glimpse Asher had of her was just before she disappeared down the stairs, her features tense with apprehension. She would be careful. She’d survived puberty in Sargasso with her honor intact. If Asher had cause to worry for anyone, it was Wesley, who departed the suite with a mutinous scowl and an outright refusal to take Victoria’s arm.

  Uncle Howard stole one final glance at Asher and tried to smile before Lucretia led him gently out the door. His lips couldn’t quite muster the effort.

  “Don’t fret,” Moreau cooed. “You’ll see them in the morning.”

  “Why couldn’t we stay together? We’d have made do with one bed—”

  Moreau scoffed. “I’ve never heard anything more improper. No, no. In Redemption, we believe in doing things by the book. The sooner your friends find themselves a spouse, the better.”

  His honeyed lilt was so palliative on Asher’s ears that he almost missed that final disclosure. “What?” He made to break off Moreau’s grip, but the vampire was faster and stronger.

  “Oh, we’ll find you a girl too”—Moreau chuckled, his hand tight around Asher’s elbow—“in due course. But first I want to know everything there is about the Red Horn Riders.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “A vampire has to eat, my boy,” Uncle Howard had once told Asher. “You can hardly begrudge them their hunger when you wake up ready to chew the legs off the kitchen table, can you?”

  At the time, Asher had believed it. Then his sixteenth birthday came around and no sooner had he finished celebrating that one of Ambrose’s acolytes helped himself to a taste right in the street, in full view of anyone who cared to look.

  No one did.

  The same neighbors who’d watched him grow from a boy into a man, who’d congratulated him just hours before, now averted their eyes and went about their business as though they couldn’t hear his screams. It had felt as if his throat were being ripped open, but pain hadn’t been the only reason his knees had melted under him. The shock of what was happening and his reaction to the ordeal had shaken Asher worse than any beating.

  He remembered how his hands had quaked as he’d washed the blood off his shirt that night. He also remembered the guilty stirring in the pit of his stomach when he’d thought of the vampire’s fangs in his throat, of the sickening, seductive stroke of his tongue over the wound.

  Ambrose’s law had kept Asher from discovering his weakness for a bloodsucker’s bite for sixteen years. In the ten that had followed since, Asher had tried everything to cure himself of the affliction.

  He blamed his recent stint as Halloran’s prisoner for undoing all that hard work.

  He blamed Halloran altogether for the desperate arch of his body into Moreau’s hands, his cock a hard, unwelcome weight straining in the confines of his trousers.

  “You are sweet, aren’t you?” Moreau hummed, curled around Asher in bed. “You’ll make your lady very happy.”

  That he liked to talk while he fed Asher had already made his peace with. That what he insisted on talking about happened to trigger salvos of panic in the pit of Asher’s stomach was another matter entirely.

  “What if—what if I don’t want a lady?” Asher panted, coherent thought rendered somewhat challenging by the throbbing between his legs.

  Moreau picked his blond head up, mouth red. When he spoke, it was around his gleaming fangs. “What a queer notion. Sweet as you are, ain’t no vampire master in this town gonna put you in his henhouse.”

  I’m not interested, Asher wanted to grit out, in hens. He’d never put his preference into words before and it wasn’t Moreau who would get him to break that vow of silence.

  Still, as Moreau went back to feeding and Asher slipped further and further from consciousness, he couldn’t help think he would have liked to at least be given a choice. But that was his lot as bloodsucker b
ait, wasn’t it? No choice. No say in what happened to him.

  He could leave Sargasso but the old rules followed him like a chronic disease.

  “You’re still alive. You should count yourself lucky.”

  The voice did not belong to Moreau, but it wasn’t until Asher opened his eyes that he saw Halloran in the chair by the window, moonlight gleaming on the satin shoulders of his waistcoat.

  Asher blinked in the rest of their surroundings. He recognized the heavy velvet drapes and frayed rug. He’d paced it often enough. The mirror across the bed revealed him to be wearing the clothes he’d been thrust into for Ambrose’s soiree.

  “We’re back at Willowbranch.”

  “I am,” Halloran corrected. “Wherever you are, you’re sleeping.”

  This again. Asher pushed himself up against the headboard, which creaked just as loudly as he remembered. He tried not to dwell on Halloran shoving him up against it and coming as close to ravaging him as any other time before or since.

  It wasn’t worth thinking about.

  “Are you…well?” Halloran asked at length, scowling as though the question itself offended him.

  Or perhaps not the question. Perhaps it was the burden of having to fill the silence with speech that bothered him.

  “I’ve been better,” Asher confessed and swept his glance over the boudoir. “But then I’ve also been worse. Chained to a bed in the nude comes to mind…”

  Halloran’s scowl didn’t ease at the jape. If anything, it deepened. A curious thing. Asher would have expected him to reflect on that portion of their acquaintance with some satisfaction.

  “And you?” he heard himself ask. “Is Ambrose giving you hell?”

  “He ain’t best pleased with me at the moment… But no. He needs me.”

  “Why?” Asher wouldn’t have dared voice the query while awake and in the same room as Halloran. He reasoned that if Halloran was just a figment of his imagination now, it couldn’t do any harm.

  And if he wasn’t, chances were so slim they’d cross paths again that he had nothing to lose by asking.

  Predictably, Halloran heaved a put-upon sigh and flattened his mouth into a line.

  Asher had given up hope for an answer when Halloran said, “For now, I am the closest thing he has to expendable infantry. He can send me out to do what he won’t waste his men on.”

  “And what’s that? Slaying his so-called pals? Raiding towns and farms all over the valley?” Asher had no fondness for the vampires who might have come under Ambrose’s fire—except in a vague, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ sort of way—but he resented Halloran his willingness to wreak havoc on the mayor’s behalf when he wouldn’t even lift a finger for the humans who’d paid to bring him to Sargasso in the first place.

  “Who told you that?”

  They’d traded enough lies that one more wasn’t about to make a dent. “I ain’t as dim as you think. I know you’ve been wakin’ snakes all over the valley. Hope it’s worth it, whatever it is you sold your soul down the river for…”

  Halloran gave a slow shake of the head. “This ain’t about me. Between all the droughts and the Depression, there’s a storm brewing in this desert. Ambrose reckons he can weather it if he’s got everyone else on their knees.”

  “I see. And the reign of Ambrose continues,” Asher drawled. “Thanks for your contribution.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Asher snorted and rubbed a knuckle into the bridge of his nose. The bed mattress dipped. Halloran was suddenly within arm’s reach, propped up on one elbow at the foot of the bed. Asher’s every muscle seized, shock rendering him too slow to react.

  “Where are you, Asher? It’s obviously not where you belong.”

  “And where’s that?” Asher hitched his eyebrows. “Here? Tied to the bed, at your disposal whenever you damn well please?”

  Halloran didn’t take the bait. “In Sargasso.”

  “Sargasso’s just another town.” Asher affected a shrug, nonchalant to the point of a lie. “What’s it ever done for me?”

  “You could have run away before,” Halloran pointed out, stubborn. “Others have. But you didn’t. You stayed and tried to fight—”

  “And this is where it got me!” It took conscious thought, but after a few moments, Asher managed to tip back against the headboard, his legs splayed before him. He was relaxed. He wasn’t going to get worked up about this sorry state of affairs.

  He wouldn’t give Halloran that satisfaction.

  “You’re right.”

  Asher arched his brow. “I am?”

  “You’re not built to be anyone’s servant. And you were a lousy goddamn prisoner.”

  Despite himself, a reluctant smile tugged at the corners of Asher’s mouth. “You were a piss-poor jailer.”

  “Yeah, well…I’m a robber, not a kidnapper. Or I was.”

  “Before you started answering to the law?” Asher wondered, mirth leaching from his voice.

  Halloran’s gaze slid down his body, but he didn’t seem to be looking at Asher so much as through him. It didn’t prevent a guilty twitch of interest from Asher’s baser instincts, nor the shame that followed.

  He shifted, pressing his knees together and locking his arms around them. “Tell me one thing.”

  Halloran peered up, his expression at once wary and hopeful.

  “Connie’s parents. Are they…?”

  “Alive,” Halloran said. “For now.”

  “How?”

  “Malachi. Don’t ask me why. I can’t tell if Ambrose’s brood is the most calculating bunch of assholes I’ve ever met or just a clutch of spoiled wastrels.”

  Asher whistled. “Does the good mayor know what you make of his family?”

  “The good mayor,” Halloran said, “knows he’s surrounded himself with vipers. And if he doesn’t, which I very much doubt, then he’s a fool.”

  He spoke with uncanny conviction. It was the most passionate Asher had heard him on any subject.

  “Why didn’t you talk to me like this when I was at Willowbranch?”

  Halloran clammed up at once. “Like what?”

  “Like…you have a brain in that head of yours. Like you ain’t just a brute who’s only motivated by his next meal.” Whom Ambrose had gifted him in a rare show of generosity, and who incidentally happened to be a human being.

  “What would I talk to you for?” Halloran sneered. “You made your feelings about my kind crystal clear ’fore we even met.”

  He had to dredge up the past. He had bring up Asher’s colossal mistake.

  Asher’s mood soured with the sharp, acidic burn of grief. “If you expect me to be sorry—”

  “I expect you to be sensible. But apparently that’s too much for your species.”

  “Sensible? And what’s that look like? Licking your boots?”

  “It looks like thinking before you do something as half-witted as run off into the goddamn desert—”

  “I’m not in the desert, you son of a bitch!” Asher blurted before he could stop himself. He regretted the admission as soon as he saw the corners of Halloran’s mouth tip up. “You scooped me in on purpose.”

  “Did you think you was the only one who could take advantage of a short fuse?” Halloran propped himself up on his hands. “So you’re not in the desert no longer… Where are you, then? The train to Mesa? Some nearby town?”

  Asher flexed his jaw, but it was too late. The answer was as good as written on his forehead.

  “Ah,” Halloran drawled. “You’ve found sanctuary somewhere.”

  “Stay out of my head.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Bullshit,” Asher snarled. “If this is my dream, then I want you out. I want you gone. You hear me? I want you—”

  Halloran’s fangs dropped like two pistols drawn too fast for the eye to see. Asher’s breaths snagged in his throat as their bodies collided. The back of his head slammed into the plaster hard enough that he saw stars.

 
He came awake with a jolt, pulse racing in his ears. The ghost of a rough kiss lingered on his mouth. Lust surged through him, vindictive and dangerous. Damn him. But wanting Halloran was nowhere as bad as having revealed to him that Asher and his friends weren’t lost in the desert anymore. There were only so many towns a man could reach leaving Sargasso on horseback.

  Redemption happened to be the closest.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The smell of charred meat hit Asher long before he glimpsed the bustle in the kitchen. From the stairwell, he counted about five silhouettes moving to and from the stove, setting out plates and brewing coffee. The hum of voices was all but absent, which left Asher to wonder at nearly half a dozen women working in such regimented silence.

  His stomach growled, putting paid to any notion of assessing his surroundings for much longer. The bite on his neck smarted as he clomped down the final handful of steps. With Moreau’s warning ringing bitterly in his ears, he took no pains to disguise his tread. If this was the mayor’s idea of a henhouse, Asher would as soon distinguish himself as a nonissue than a threat.

  Wary faces greeted him at the kitchen threshold, casting a pall of doubt over his success in the matter.

  “Good morning, ladies.” Asher tried on a smile. “I, uh… Something smells delicious.”

  None of the women answered.

  The kitchen was a busy hub, clearly the heart of the house even if it all belonged to a vampire. Its overflowing shelves marked a sharp contrast to the scarcity Asher had witnessed at Willowbranch, where a bit of porridge and a cup of Arbuckle’s was the best he could muster to break the monotony of hardtack and sharp cheese.

  He cleared his throat and tried again. “My friends and I came to Redemption only yesterday… Mr. Moreau didn’t happen to mention it?”

  Or that he insisted I enjoy his personal hospitality? In his bed?

  Asher didn’t know whether to be relieved or dismayed that the man himself was nowhere to be seen. His presence would’ve made this easier, but without it, Asher could always try to talk his way into taking in the sights before shackles tightened around his ankles once more. “Don’t suppose any of you know where I could find a vampire named Ivan?”