Cruel Angels Past Sundown

by Hailey Piper, Anna Kubik

Genres: Westerns; Horror

Synopsis

New Mexico Territory, 1882: She comes to the Klein ranch at sunset, a strange naked pregnant woman dragging a cavalry saber. Annette Klein and her husband have built peace between their marriage and secret relations beyond, but their serenity dies in bloodshed tonight through a cannibalistic demon and a mad preacher. Annette barely escapes the bloodbath to the nearby town of Low' s Bend, where she might find safety with a shotgun-toting barkeep, two no-nonsense boarding room ladies, and the gunslinging bounty hunter who' s captured Annette' s heart. But hell is at her heels. If she' s going to survive until dawn, she' ll have to forget everything she knows about peace and mercy, and face a hollow malevolence more ancient and ruthless than she' s ever imagined.

Release date: July 25, 2023

Publisher: Death's Head Press

Print pages: 191

Sample

ONE:

Saber

THE WOMAN BEGAN as a hazy pale stalk in the distant prairie with a gleam beside her catching the sunshine, and that was everything Annette Ruthie Klein could make out from beside the grooved wooden fencepost.

She had been approaching Big Pete’s pen when the light-on-metal glint caught her eye. Her brother Henry used to mind the old bull, but he had gone the way of Mother’s sickness, and half the cattle herd had followed. Between Annette and her husband Frank, they had both needed to toughen, open up, and reach some understanding, or else let the ranch collapse around them. Annette did most of the coming and going, and sometimes Frank went with her, rarely by himself.

No visitor had come to the ranch since that last futile stop-in by Dr. Hastings, and they had followed him out with Mother’s body in tow.

No visitor until this woman came staggering in from nowhere.

Annette eyed Big Pete beyond the fencing, a tired black bull with a lazy disposition. He didn’t eye Annette back, only huffed and grazed and swatted flies with his swinging tail. By the time she tore her gaze again to the pale strip on the prairie, the woman had stepped closer and sharpened to a clear shape. No more a stalk against rough brown soil and patches of brush, but alive and human.

In her right hand, she clutched a cavalry saber, its steel blade blinking the last of the daylight. She wore no dress, no hat, not a scrap of clothing on her. She was too fair to have been walking in this sunshine naked—no tanning like Annette, no reddening—as if her saber had deflected every ray of sunshine.

And she was pregnant, skin stretched around a smooth round belly, heavy with child. Her bent posture said she felt the weight.

“Frank?” Annette called, letting go of the fence post. “Something ain’t right.”

What could he do? She wasn’t sure, but he needed to know someone had come to the ranch.

If only Annette had gone to town today. If only she had spent yet another night in a room that wasn’t hers.

The sky swelled red, the sun dipping behind distant western mountains. The naked woman seemed a white slit in a strange cat’s eye, nearer now, nearer, almost to the fence. In moments she would be close enough for Annette to reach out and touch.

A huffing moan quaked through Big Pete’s mountainous bulk, and he retreated from Annette to find surviving patches of brush on the far side of his pen. Wasn’t she supposed to put him somewhere? Pasture, barn, the moon—clear thoughts sweated and mixed together. Her wide straw hat might guard her scalp and skin from the sun, but not her mind.

Or was the trouble this woman, now five steps away? The sight of her was making Annette dizzy. Did she want Annette’s dull blue dress to cover her nakedness, to tear it away and reveal Annette’s leathered skin and taut muscle? Except Annette had to be the stronger of the two. The woman was almost skeletal, her limbs and torso thin except at her belly.

Either she was three months along and only showing for her thinness, or she was nine months along and her unborn child had taken to drinking and devouring everything but her skin and bones.

Annette was healthier, fitter, and didn’t need clothes, or food, or home. She should give everything over and let this woman take her place at the ranch.

“The hell’s with her?” a deep voice asked.

Annette hadn’t heard her husband approaching. Frank Klein was a man born grown and aged, his exhaustion an inherited part of his soul. He wore a dark blue shirt, its buttons sewn by Annette’s hand. His black mustache bent in a scowl as he turned from the pregnant woman to Annette.

“You know her?” he asked, his voice curious, ever-patient.

Annette opened her mouth, but her tongue was a flat dead animal behind her teeth.

Frank seemed to notice only now the woman was naked. His cheeks reddened, the most bashful man Annette had ever met, and he glanced away. “Lead her in,” he said. “I’ll fetch one of them blankets.”

He was off toward the ranch house before Annette could ask how she would lead the woman. Her gaze crossed Big Pete again—wandering now—and then the woman stood right behind her. A mane of shaggy black hair haloed a narrow face with pursed lips, a small nose, and eyes leaning the yellow side of brown. They almost seemed to shine with the waning sunlight, the same as her saber.

Was Annette supposed to lead her to the barn? Had that been Big Pete? Her thoughts were melted butter down her spine. She stumbled back from the naked woman, nervous against touching that skin, likely hot as a sunbaked salt flat. The gleaming saber turned sideways, a bright smile over the soil.

“Come,” Annette said, and she stumbled back another step. “Come along, saber girl.” Except this woman was too grown to be a girl. A lady with her weapon, naked or not, deserved better than to be called after with a wave and a high-pitched tone as if Annette were leading reluctant cattle

home.

But Saber seemed more animal than human, didn’t she? Naked as a beast, quieter than Big Pete, only staring without end, her head full of wind and instinct.

Still, she knew enough to follow.

The ranch house stood with unpainted wooden walls and a leaning roof with its two chimneys jutting hornlike to either side. Its doorway often hung dark, neither Annette nor Frank bothering to light more than a wispy lantern near dusk anymore.

But tonight candles glowed along the supper table beyond the front doorway and kitchen, and more of them dotted the sitting room shelves to one side. Their small flames danced in Saber’s eyes.

Frank appeared from the sitting room carrying a thick woolen blanket. He passed it to Annette, and she wrapped it around Saber’s shoulders. Her arms dangled at her sides.

“Sit her down,” Frank said, pulling out a wooden chair from the supper table—his chair, at the head. When Saber didn’t move from Annette’s side, he patted the seat with a thick, scarred hand. “Here, miss.”

Saber shuffled toward the seat and collapsed onto it. Annette’s mind boiled, but she pulled the blanket snug around their guest’s front and covered her nakedness. Better than dressing her. That would be like fitting a shirt onto a wolf, but Annette had tossed blankets on the horses, cows, and even Big Pete. Had she left him outside or brought him in? She couldn’t remember. Maybe he would act like Saber must have, shifting shape from beast to human. Any minute, he would wander inside, naked and silent, holding a horn in each hand instead of a sword.

Frank knelt beside Saber’s seat. His bones creaked all the way down, and he had to set a hand on the table’s edge to steady himself. He managed to look into Saber’s amber eyes, her nakedness no longer so obvious.

“Got a name, miss?” he asked, gentle as the blanket.

Saber stared hard at the table as if her name were carved into its planks.

“Where you come from?” Frank shifted uncomfortably. “Someone take your clothes? Who did this to you?”

There was a strange ticking, and Annette hoped it was Saber’s mouth slinging open to speak.

The tick came again, and Annette glanced under the table—the point of Saber’s blade tapped the plank floor, up and down with her slow breath.

“How about that sword?” Frank asked. “Looks like cavalry issue from the war, what, twenty years back? Maybe your husband’s? Or your father’s? You’re too young for it.” He smiled, as if he thought Saber might laugh at his little joke, but she remained sullen.

Annette wanted to chuckle, felt it bubble in her throat, but she didn’t have the strength for humor. Saber’s head turned in steady inches, and her yellow gaze shifted across the candlelit room. She seemed to be looking anywhere for answers. Annette had none. She couldn’t have even stood if Frank weren’t here. Without him, the walls might turn to mud and then slop down to the floor, abandoning all shape. Through the windows, sunset purpled the world.

“You hungry? Thirsty?” Frank made to stand. “Powerful heat today, miss.”

Annette’s voice rolled out. “Saber.” The blade no longer gleamed with reflected sunshine, but candlelight kept it smiling even in the dim ranch house. Tick, tick.

Frank glanced at the point as it tapped the floor again. “Wouldn’t part her with it,” he said. “That’d be like pulling out a cat’s claws. She wouldn’t hurt no one with that if she didn’t have to.”

A thin red teardrop traced down his cheek. The color had to be some trick of the light, but when he wiped it with his sleeve, a dark splotch stained his shirt. There was no impatience in the firm line of his mouth. His brown eyes lit with nothing more than an earnest desire to help this poor woman as red tears streaked down his face.

Didn’t his heart hurt to stare into her eyes? His thoughts seemed solid enough to ask questions.

Annette couldn’t say the same. Husband and wife alike usually came stiff and sturdy as fenceposts, standing firm after a storm when everything else had been blown away, no choice in it.

But not tonight. Annette had turned from a fencepost into a puddle of spilled milk, and Frank’s demeanor seemed pillowy. He should have been aggrieved over Saber’s full womb while Annette’s kept empty—or was that Annette’s expectation he might know her guilt?

They were due for a trip into town for some distraction, but distraction had come to them instead.

They supped on dry bread and the remains of an earlier chicken and leek stew. Annette kept dropping her spoon, her hands forgetting how to hold it. She didn’t clean up either, not even to wipe the sticky fluid from her cheeks. Every step sloshed as if the floor teetered. She had never set foot on a ship, but her father had as a boy, he’d once told her when she was a child, shortly before his death. He had said the deck swayed up and down like they were sailing on a giant’s chest. The ranch house did the same tonight.

Saber did not eat or drink. No cracked lips, no sunburn, no dry scaling on her hands. Like Annette and Frank had imagined this woman out of the spring wind, someone to bear children for them when they had none.

Was their absence because of him? Because of her? A mystery, but no matter the reason, Frank could never know her secret relief. He had accepted so much strangeness in her town trips, respected her needs, even joined her, listened to her, understood and bore it all, but to know she had never wanted his children would have hurt his heart, and this good man didn’t deserve the pain.

If Saber brought them children, taking on the role of mother that Annette had never wanted, she would be a blessing more than a phantom. If it made Frank happy, she would welcome it.

Cattle lowed beyond the ranch house walls. Were they out stalking the fences, or did they stand in the barn? Annette didn’t know.

Frank spoke haltingly with a drowsy tone. “Annie. See what’s. Fussing. Them animals. Would you?”

Annette wanted to ask why he was crying blood, or if she was crying as many red tears. The words wouldn’t form. The cattle lowed again, demanding she mind them.

She wobbled to her feet and started for the front door, but her path skewed toward the sitting room’s small square window. The crimson sun scarcely peeked over the western mountains, and every fencepost’s shadow scraped claw-like toward the ranch house. That had to be what was spooking the animals. There were coyotes to consider, and sometimes wolves, but Annette didn’t see them.

Maybe the predators, too, were frightened. She couldn’t say why. The shadows might reach out and terrify every lean predator for a hundred miles.

She was frightened with them, but she couldn’t say why.

The air sagged against the floor as she turned from the window. She dropped to her hands and knees. Wooden planks pressed her fingertips, but they’d turned muddy since she crossed the house. Lit candles glowed with purple-red auras, each a miniature dusk with its own drowsy sun. Red tears clotted Annette’s eyes.

Her dreams had no firm skeletons to keep them standing, only flesh and tissue and bones, a collapsing cavern of innards without rhyme or reason. Nothing held real shape inside this red nightmare, but Annette found Saber’s face and a raw, unnamable taste in her mouth.

The word came to her as she woke up—blood. She must have bitten her tongue when she hit the floor, though no wound stung when she ran its dry pad back and forth under her curious teeth. The taste lingered in her throat, a copper coin tossed into a campfire. She must have swallowed in her sleep, taking dreams, blood, and a mysterious wound down her throat.

The sitting room candles had gone out, leaving the house a black framework bracing moonlit windows. Did a hand brush her collarbone, or was that the wind?

Heat stirred in her chest, some of those melted thoughts pooling in her heart, her lungs, down, down. She couldn’t tell where they ended, her body a bottomless channel along an infinite spine. She didn’t want to tell.

A wet crackle iced her skin. Something shuffled in the darkness. Coyote? Wolf?

Annette pressed against the floor, inhaled the smell of dust, and then listened. She knew the general restlessness surrounding the ranch house. That was prairie life, all insects and wind, and coyote howls you hoped kept distant. Something was always loud and alive in the prairie night.

The crackle came again, a ticking. Saber’s sword? No, too damp, a throat full of trapped air. Annette would have thought she’d swallowed a bubble of blood and made the noise herself, but the sound crossed the ranch house. She couldn’t see what walked there, but she felt it break from one patch of darkness and scrape bare feet across the wooden planks toward the bedroom. Steel tapped the walls.

Annette rolled from flat on her back and onto her hands and knees again. She crept low through the hall, behind the moving darkness. Frank had been too tired and dizzy to notice she had passed out, but he must have made it to bed.

Where Saber found him.

She was a pale figure wreathed in blackness against the moonlight. That heavenly glow filled the bedroom as she approached the bed’s foot, blade in her right hand, her flesh freed from the blanket.

So then, Frank was fond of this woman. Maybe because she showed proof in her very figure that she could give the children that Annette had not and didn’t want to.

That was fine. Her heart trembled and her throat tightened, but she forced herself to swallow that tightness, remember hers and Frank’s understanding, and accept this moment. He should have talked it out with her, but she was drowsy—it was fine. She, too, kept a piece of her heart elsewhere. There were nights he joined her in the boarding rooms above Slim’s Respite in town, but there were nights she kept for herself and Gloria Travers, and Annette couldn’t ask Frank for absolute faithfulness when she wouldn’t do it herself. Besides, the bed offered plenty of room. They each had their needs and love. He must have

whispered in Saber’s ear to come find him after dark, while Annette slept on the sitting room floor, his good humor at last breaking through Saber’s shock and silence.

Her round belly slid onto the bedding. Frank might pretend he was the man who’d impregnated her. Would she stay until the birth? Beyond? Would he and Annette help raise whatever slipped out between those white stick legs?

She should have asked, but right now she could hardly sit upright. One hand squeezed the bedroom’s chipped doorframe, but it wouldn’t help her stand. Every muscle tensed through her bowed legs, down her bent back.

Saber had no muscle like this. Her skin was an ash-white suggestion against the world, a dream allowed to walk the wakeful night. She crept onto the bed by hand and knee and saber, up Frank’s legs, between them, to his chest. Her back arched, arms raised. Another wet crackle filled the room as her blade flashed a moonlit grin.

And then it sank into the warmest parts of him, painting dark streaks across its steel tooth.

Annette’s hand let go of the doorframe and dropped over her mouth. A toad-like scream croaked and died in her throat.

“Annie?” Frank wheezed as if Annette could do anything to stop this.

His throat crackled, the same as Saber out in the sitting room, and his limbs jittered. One arm slopped off the bedside. Red rivers flooded the bedding, and then red waves. A familiar copper stink filled the air.

Saber jimmied her blade by the hilt as if rowing a boat down these bloody waters. Dark stains spattered over the pillows, headboard, and walls, all glistening in moonlit dots and ringlets down her once-unblemished skin.

The blade worked into Frank’s chest and levered his ribcage up, a damp sun rising within the mountain of his flesh. Saber’s free hand clawed into the stretched cavity, and her face lowered. A wet fat snake of a tongue uncurled through lips and teeth, long as her arm, and its tip hunted somewhere

inside the open cavity. She must have been hungry after all.

Annette slipped from the doorframe. Flailing hands pawed at floor and wall, back and back until a surface touched her from behind and made her gasp—nothing worse than the wall opposite the doorway.

But she couldn’t inhale the gasp like it had never happened.

Saber’s tongue froze wet in the moonlight. Her free hand slid back, fingers tangled with dark, nameless lumps, and her face turned from the gory cavern. Her jaw worked back and forth. She might have been trying to speak, but she only managed a heavy groan, as if an aging wooden house had settled in her throat.

Annette shifted from the doorway’s view and stumbled backward into the ranch house’s darkness. She would become one with it, the way Saber had when she’d crossed from the sitting room to this freshly painted bedroom. Night’s blanket would hide her.

Saber’s wooden groaning followed Annette into the black. She staggered past the kitchen and supper table, out the front door. The sky blazed with stars and moon, and the world seemed less lonely when cattle lowed near.

Each step found firmer ground. Away from Saber, Annette stood straighter, and the muscles down her back and legs remembered they were strong. Her thoughts found their shapes again. She hadn’t put Big Pete or the rest of the cattle to bed tonight, an absolute certainty she could lean on. Why had the inside of her home felt so murky? Why couldn’t she think clearly when Saber stepped close?

Glancing back, the ranch house seemed solid and unshifting. It did not sail on a giant’s chest in the way of her father’s ship when he was a boy.

Frank couldn’t be dead in there. Not with the rifles leaning by the sitting room fireplace and a shotgun loaded under the bed. His death must have been part of Annette’s red nightmare and its copper tastes. She had dreamed a bloody cavern and then seen one in Frank’s chest, same as when seeing a muzzle flare and then turning away shut-eyed, its ghost might stick behind the eyelids. She had only her thoughts to blame. What kind of repulsive woman dreamed of her husband’s death?

But then, what kind of woman stood useless while another woman murdered him?

If Annette went back, she would know for certain, but only if Saber allowed it. Every thought might melt again the moment Annette stepped within five feet of that strange woman.

Turning west, away from the house, Annette looked into a brilliant star-dotted sky, an ancient place she might hide inside. She rubbed her cheek against her shoulder, scattering red crust across blue fabric, and thought she heard Saber’s groan again.

If the red tears and the groan were real, wouldn’t that mean Annette hadn’t been dreaming? Or maybe a dream had thought her up instead, as if there were no such thing as Annette, only a consciousness she didn’t understand, a dream older than its dreamer. Even dream places might sleep inside themselves. Deeper and deeper, like the thin layers of an egg, and what would hatch from inside now? Not Annette, already born twenty-nine winters ago. No tooth-beaked fluffy chick, either.

She heard the groan again and wondered what might nest in Saber’s belly. Who was she? Where had she come from? Was there a father?

Did this new stranger know, approaching from the outer darkness?

Annette blinked, half-convinced she was dreaming him, too, and yet his shape persisted, emerging from shadows the closer he stalked across the western prairie. A heavy coat hung around his shoulders, partway hiding a black jacket and white shirt above stiff black pants. A round-brimmed black hat cast a shadow down his deep-lined, clean-shaven face. Old as Frank? No, a bit older. This man might have been a preacher, or a man who would steal a preacher’s clothes.

His eyes stared much too blue for a desert night. Almost unreal, and yet the rest of him was solid. If dreams had birthed this firm man, they might birth all things, a nightly womb for God to create the world in secret. 

The thought was strange—God had no womb, only almighty fingers—and Annette pushed it away as the stranger paused three paces from her. His thick boots ground the soil.

“You seem to have wandered from your place, little lamb,” the stranger said. His voice was clear and crisp, the kind Frank said came to men who liked talking above anything else. “Not to worry. Men of God act as shepherds to mankind’s flock, and we come well-suited for guiding lambs where they belong.” He tipped his hat, and the shadow briefly deepened down his face. “Name’s Balthazar Wilcox. This is the Klein ranch? You’re Frank Klein’s wife, yes? Tell me your name, child of God.”

“Annette Ruthie Klein.” She looked over her shoulder to the ranch house, and it stood darker than the sky and farther distant than she’d realized, little more than a squat outline beneath the moon. How had bad dreams ever chased her so far from home?

“Ruth,” Balthazar said, weighing the middle name. “From the Bible. Did you know that?”

Annette turned to him again—two paces away—and shook her head. She had never heard the name Ruth mentioned in any Sunday sermons when she and Frank rode into town for church.

“I find kinship with Biblical Ruth. Like her, I’m a soul of unwavering faith.” Balthazar took another step closer. “Perhaps I find kinship with you, too. Are you of unwavering faith, Annette?”

“I couldn’t say.” The night’s chill crawled up Annette’s arms as if it might warm itself in her dress. She wanted to tell it to find Saber if it needed warmth. She could melt the wind’s thoughts.

“That’s fine, just fine.” Balthazar stepped again, and his scuffing boots kicked dust onto Annette’s. “You’re young, not yet a mother. It is your place to be fertile ground for the truth and the future. When you enter God’s kingdom, there will be no sin to wash away but that of our forebears. You have faith in this, don’t you?”

The moon’s reflection now gleamed down a strange dagger in one hand, the blade as long as Annette’s forearm. Balthazar’s thick fingers partway hid the

grip, but two arms stretched to either side of the hilt, and a head bulged between. The dagger had been fashioned from a wooden carving of Christ nailed to the cross.

The chill sank beneath Annette’s skin. She could still be dreaming, but that felt like wishful thinking. None of this moment dribbled as formless as every second she’d spent with Saber. This man stood rigid as mountains and endless as the sky.

His coat billowed when he leaned toward her. “What might you be doing outside your house tonight?” His hand hefted the crucifix-dagger.

Annette tried to speak. Words had been easier, like thoughts, since she left Saber. Or since she forgot the dream of Saber.

But only a strange croak slipped up her throat.

Light flickered in Balthazar’s eyes, the moon no longer wishing to know their brightness. “Where did you hear that?” he asked.

“I ain’t sure,” Annette said. But she was. The sound must have drawn him. He’d come from the same direction as Saber, toward Klein pastures and fences and the ranch house. “Did you dream her?”

Balthazar didn’t seem to hear the question. He stood to his full height, a pillar of a man against the bright sky. “She has set her pale mark into you. That is a shame. She keeps the hope, but she wears a sin nearly from the time when stars were young and men knew not dreams nor speech nor pain. Original sin reaches roots through us all, and you are pregnant.”

Annette gaped to say not her, never, Saber was pregnant, but no words came.

“Pregnant not with child but with sin,” Balthazar said. His dagger’s blade glinted, catching the moon. “It is in you, and upon you.”

He wasn’t making sense. He knew about Saber, so why talk to Annette? Why waste his time? She needed to turn around and go home. No more dreams or strangers.

Balthazar raised a calloused hand, and his voice was steady. “As Gabriel once spoke to Mary of Nazareth, mother of God, be not afraid. I’m not disappointed in you. She has sensed trouble in your soul and shared

 it, my lost little lamb. You are not the first.”

Annette stepped backward. One shoe caught against a mound of dirt, and her voice shook when she stumbled. “I ought to head home.” She glanced over her shoulder again. The ranch house still stood at some distance.

“Indeed, you long for your husband’s house, but our great father above calls us children home,” Balthazar said. “I would see you answer God’s call before any other.”

Annette turned from the ranch house to Balthazar again, and the chill devoured her heart.

Tears rolled down Balthazar’s cheeks. “You are blessed tonight, Annette Ruthie Klein.”

His arm snapped toward her and plunged the crucifix-dagger into her chest as a creaking groan rang through the night. He jerked at the last moment, distracted.

Annette’s hands jittered toward her chest as he pulled the blade free. Her fingers ran warm and sticky. Stern muscle sagged beneath her and yanked her to the earth. The world squeezed into tiny points of light in a black fog.

Balthazar gave a haggard sigh, muttering under his breath. He strode past Annette and toward the ranch house. His footsteps thudded hard in her ears. “What’s she found now?” he asked, maybe to the wind.

Annette stared at the dimming ground, heart thrumming. She could still breathe. So long as she lived, she could step. Move. Try.

She staggered up from the earth, one hand bunching her torn dress around the chest wound, the other swiping at the air for something to grab onto and steady herself. Her palm slapped wood, found a latch, and loosened it. A gate creaked open, and its groan sent her shaking, too much like Saber’s throat while her hand and sword had dug beneath Frank’s ribs.

Annette’s chest screamed, shooting cold sweat down her skin. This was no dream. Any simple nightmare would be a relief.

A bulky shadow stirred

 ahead of her. She forced one foot forward, and then the other. She wondered if Balthazar had stabbed Saber before she came to the ranch, and that was why she walked like she didn’t know how. Nothing seemed certain anymore. The whole world bled a melted slush of sticky fluid, creaking throats, and steel in flesh.

Annette’s hand settled on thick, bristly hair matted across corded muscle, and she clambered onto a warm mountain. The bright moon she’d watched bathe her bedroom was a stranger now, an eyelid closed over its light, at least to her. A beast walked beneath her in this new dark, and she could only hope it wanted to flee as badly as she did.

TWO:

The Blood and the Bull

RESTLESS STARS CRAWLED between Annette’s narrowed eyelids. They sometimes snuck through the slits and haunted the blackness beneath. Other times, her eyelids shut deep, locking her in worse places than the dark, where the red nightmare painted Frank’s insides through her skull. Here and there, Saber’s pale face emerged from this tarry pool of gore, as if she swam the back of Annette’s thoughts.

And then Annette would thrust her eyelids open a crack and see the stars again. She had to keep awake, or else the dreams would drag her into Frank’s opened chest.

If she slept, she couldn’t escape her hunters.

She felt them behind her. Wolves, coyotes, could be cougars, too. And worse. She might be riding some monstrous beast that heaved each muscle onward like a man pushing a boulder up an impossible hillside. Her world swayed, and she thought she might have wandered back inside the ranch house, with her husband’s body, and croaking Saber, and Balthazar preaching over them, eyes closed to the new copper-scented paint.

But Annette had left the house behind, and only Big Pete lumbered beneath her. She’d found the black-haired bull by some miracle in the dark, and now he carried her along the southbound road. Had she found one of the horses, they might have galloped too hard at blood’s scent and thrown her off.

Big Pete was in no hurry. From town talk, riding him shouldn’t have been this easy, but he wasn’t like other bulls. Ancient and tired, he didn’t shrug off the burden. His path bent around a brief dark shadow—some small hill?—and warm auburn light dotted the distance.

Annette let her eyelids sink with a smile. Nothing hunted her, not preachers, predators, or the damned. Balthazar was right from the start. He had stabbed her in cold blood with his crucifix-dagger, and somehow that tool had lightened her soul enough to climb toward God’s domain.

No more guilt for what she used to do behind the locked doors of Slim’s Respite when she would make excuses to Slim behind his bar, tip her hat to him in heading upstairs, and slide into another bed for an hour, or two, or too many. No more shame that Frank had joined her. No more heartache when she pretended remorse each time he longed to see her belly swell with their future children.

Unless her soul might be found unworthy. What sins remained in it? Had she mourned Henry and Mother right? Her father, too, dead these many years? Or might their souls be whispering in Christ’s ear, Not Annette, not my sister, not our daughter, don’t make us spend eternity with the likes of her. Or maybe God’s will worked like Arch Bower said, that drunken Calvinist, preaching through a whiskey bottle that all fates had been decided at the beginning of time. Or his Catholic friend—Annette couldn’t remember his name tonight—who once explained that everyone rested in their coffins until the world’s end.

Heaven awaited, and Annette

 was almost there.

What would they say when she approached on a bull’s back? She hoped Big Pete would be welcome in God’s embrace. She hoped she would follow. Heaven must have seen worse than a stabbed young woman in a blood-spattered blue dress, her tawny hair matted damp and crimson down her severe face. The angels welcomed the tortured and mutilated and torn open across the centuries. Annette would be no shock to them.

Her eyelids shut out the stars again, and that red nightmare crawled onto her, into her, a thick coppery slug in her mouth. Nothing paradisical in this. A face drifted in the blood, but she forced her eyelids up at Big Pete’s next step.

Sharp-edged silhouettes broke the light where wooden columns held awnings over squat porches. Glass glowed alive across broad windows. Most of the buildings ahead sat dark, but someone kept lanterns or candles lit. Was that singing Annette heard? Chatter?

She understood now. Big Pete was no horse, but he and the horses must have formed some rapport through the long nights, and they had taught him the ways they traveled. That, or he’d chosen the path of least resistance, a dirt road trailing south past the ranch and toward faint lamplight.

Toward people.

Had Annette come to Low’s Bend at noon, the townsfolk would have gawked and gaped at her riding in half-dead and drenched in blood atop her ranch’s big bull. Instead, she rode in on the dusk side of midnight, and no one walked the streets to point or cower or help her.

Except where Big Pete lumbered. In the glow of Slim’s Respite, travelers and townsfolk alike could find drink, bed, and company. She hoped Dr. Hastings was staying for a late round.

She slid off Big Pete’s back onto dry, flat earth. The landing shook her legs buttery at the knees, and she started to fall. One hand grasped Big Pete’s hair. He grunted discomfort, but he didn’t lash out, as gentle as Frank. She leaned into him, tensed her legs, and crossed two wooden steps onto Slim’s flat porch. Boards creaked beneath her boots.

Two swinging doors waited for her to push them. The doorway looked narrower than she remembered, and she would have chalked it up to her swaying footsteps, but the light parted around flat boards—storm shutters. Slim expected bad weather soon and meant to keep that trouble out of his establishment.

Annette hoped she wasn’t another kind of trouble. She leaned hard into the doors, swinging them inward, and collapsed into another nightmare.

 

THREE:

Respite

DARK WINDOWS SAID it was still nighttime when Annette again surfaced to the world. Scarlet curtains hung to either side of slender windowpanes, where a curious wind prodded the glass, but nothing came creeping into the dim room, lit only by a bedside candle.

She knew this place. Low’s Bend, Slim’s Respite, second floor, Treasure’s room.

Annette rarely slept in this bed, or Sylvia’s next door. When Gloria came to town, those were the overnight visits. Was she here now?

Annette made to sit up, but a gentle hand pressed her back. Flickering golden light framed two figures.

Sylvia kept her black hair braided back, and she wore a maroon corset and petticoat. Her lips pursed in worry down her russet-brown face as she aimed one dark eye at Annette. A black banded eyepatch covered beneath the other brow.

“Don’t worry, Annie, you’re safe,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she believed it.

Beside her, Treasure wore a blue corset and petticoat and cream gloves, almost as pale as her chalky skin. Dr. Hastings had said she had—what was it? Alb-something. Albert? Albatross? Words had turned to fireflies since Saber’s coming, enchanting and yet slipping through Annette’s fingers. Treasure kept indoors most days. Unlike Saber, she would burn in the sunlight.

“Dear, dear Nettie,” Treasure said. “Oh, I’d sure hoped you might sleep the night. That was such a nasty scratch.”

Annette lowered her chin to her collarbone. Her dress buttons were undone, her bloodied dress flayed open like a stretched skin, and a crude cloth bandage draped her left breast. A red-black stain soaked the center but had quit spreading.

A bandage shouldn’t have been enough to help had Balthazar stabbed her deep, let alone all the way to her heart. But if she hadn’t been passing out over blood loss, then why? Still adrift in her head over Saber? Or had Annette been too shocked seeing Frank’s crimson-spattered body? If she was wrong about how badly she’d been hurt, she might have been wrong about his injuries, too.

She pressed Treasure’s hand away and sat up. “Anyone else?”

“Anyone else?” Treasure fluttered dark lashes over pale green eyes. “Such as?”

The wind rattled the glass again, and Sylvia chinned toward it. “Frank?” she asked, and then yawned. She had likely been up all day, waiting and wondering at the roads. Few travelers came to Low’s Bend of late. Neighboring ranchers and their families made up most of the small town’s traffic.

Annette hoped there would be few travelers tonight too. Herself, Gloria if she was lucky, and no one else unless Frank had somehow survived and made his way to town. If anyone came hunting, then they knew they hadn’t killed her. Saber or Balthazar, or both.

Treasure narrowed her eyes at the window and then turned to Sylvia. “See any lantern out there?” Sylvia shook her head.

A lack of lanterns meant nothing. Balthazar hadn’t carried any light. Annette couldn’t

guess how he found his way, but the stars and moon were bright tonight and would keep that way unless those storm shutters she’d seen coming in had good reason to stand ready. Saber didn’t seem to need light, either. The night didn’t fight her, and the darkness was too happy to swallow her pallor.

“Either of you seen Gloria?” Annette asked.

Sylvia smirked, and her eye brightened.

“You ask like she wouldn’t be in this room right now if we had, sweetheart,” Treasure said. “She was due in this week, last I heard, but how’s she supposed to know when she’ll ride back? Could be tomorrow, or in two days. Hope she’s in some town, not roughing it between. Mort tells Slim there’s a dust storm rolling in.”

Mortimer—now Annette remembered Arch’s Catholic friend, much as two friends might argue over every conceivable subject. Words and thoughts would return to her the longer she kept away from the monster who’d come staggering onto her family ranch. The rest of her life, with any luck.

Boots tromped up the steps from the first floor. A familiar voice shouted he would be right back downstairs, and then knuckles tapped Treasure’s door. She thrust a blanket over Annette’s chest and swirled around in a flurrying petticoat as the doorknob turned.

“Dr. Hastings?” Annette called.

“No,” Sylvia said, almost despondent.

Slim Santiago-Beltran stepped through the doorway, a narrow Mestizo man of angles and edges. A white button-up peeked through his dark vest and above his darker slacks. His black hair waved to one side as if following smoke from the thin cigar jutting along his smooth brown face. Hard eyes settled on Annette.

“How’s it feeling?” Slim asked, with the smoky gravel of a young man trying to sound older.

Annette felt nothing. Covered by the blanket, she could almost believe she’d dreamed up the wound, Balthazar’s strange dagger, and everything else since Saber had come to the ranch. But no one would come riding into town on Big Pete over any old nightmare.

“How’s my bull?” Annette asked.

Sylvia covered her mouth

against a laugh.

Slim grinned around his cigar. “With the horses. They don’t bother him, and he’s no bother to them. We’ll bring him back to your ranch tomorrow. Not sure how or why he got you here, though.”

Annette set her jaw. They weren’t going to believe her. She didn’t believe herself. Calling everything a dream when blood had soaked her dress, steel had cut her skin, and her husband—her arms curled against her like a dead spider’s limbs, as if taut muscle could stop memory.

Treasure sat at the bed’s edge and tugged Annette close. “What’s the matter, darling? You’re looking sickly all of a sudden. We’re gentle here, you know that.”

Even this gloved hand made Annette scream beneath her skin. She was raw right now. Over steel? Or Saber? There was no knowing.

“Dr. Hastings?” she asked again.

“Hastings headed for one of the ranches a week ago,” Slim said. “No sign of him since. Been that way for a few ranchers, too.”

A week without the doctor. Strange, but not like he’d never been gone so long before. If she wasn’t badly hurt, what could he do to help her anyway? She could stitch skin herself, but no one could stitch Frank’s chest whole. If Dr. Hastings rode into town ahead of any storm and she brought him back to the ranch, he could only pronounce her husband dead.

Her chest stung when she began to cry. Treasure’s embrace tightened, while Sylvia patted Annette’s hair, some locks stiff with congealed blood. Slim chewed at his cigar and waited.

“Tell us,” Sylvia said.

“You’re with friends, you know,” Treasure said, and then more insistent, “You do know.”

Slim drew the door shut. Sometimes Annette overheard him telling Arch or anyone in the downstairs saloon that Annette liked to come by and chat with the boarding room ladies, her husband too, and at Gloria’s coming that Annette liked to stay up the night listening to stories of bounties, trades, and rough living in the wilderness.

Always fluttering around me, Gloria had said once. My little butterfly. And that name stuck, lending enough truth to Slim’s excuses to seem like it was the whole truth,

But Slim knew there was more, as did Treasure and Sylvia. The walls of Slim’s Respite were not thick. None of them could keep safe here without the others looking after them. Whether they were friends out of mutual protection, or that protection came from sensing kinship, Treasure was right—Annette was with friends. And tonight’s evils were stirring in her chest, longing to be shared.

“We keep each other’s secrets, don’t we?” Slim asked. His flaring cigar seemed to wink a firelit eye.

Annette let out a harsh breath. She couldn’t keep the terrible night locked inside, whether she wanted to believe it or not, whether anyone else believed it. And they would try their best to be here for her when Gloria and Frank could not.

In slow bursts, catching her words and trying not to let the world go dark, Annette told them.