The boy rode hard for his village of San Thomas, recently known as Santa Sangre.
CHAPTER TWO
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”
“What is it, Pilar?”
“I have hatred in my heart.”
“For whom, my child?”
“For the men we call The Guns of Santa Sangre.”
“They saved our village from the werewolves, Pilar. Saved all of our lives. Killed all of the monsters. It was because you found and brought these men that the town survives. Why do you hate them?”
“Because they left.”
“Their work was done.”
“Because they left me.”
“I see. You loved one of these vaqueros?”
“Yes.”
“Heartbreak is not a sin, my child.”
“I gave my virginity to him, father.”
“Did he force you?”
“No. Never. It was my free will.”
“He promised he would marry you?”
“No.”
“Did he say he would take you with him?”
“I knew he and the other two, Fix and Bodie, would ride away when they had killed the werewolves. It was in the books.”
“What books do you mean?”
“The western pulps. The dime novels the old missionary brought for me to teach me English when I was a little girl. They were always stories about brave gunfighters who came to a place and saved the people from bad men with their six guns and swept the woman off her feet, but always in the end rode off on their horses, alone. I believed this was how it would be.”
“The vaquero did not lie, then.”
“But now I am alone. I am husbandless. Why is it I feel so abandoned, father? I feel such a fool. These naive childish notions I had. The vaqueros left not because of a noble destiny ... they just left. Left me behind. This is all.”
“Your place is here, in the town. People depend on you.”
“I know this.”
“The calientes are men of action. They could not remain here.”
“I know this too. I know all of this, Father.”
“But?”
“It shames me to confess.”
“Go on.”
“At night, when I lie in bed, with no tasks to occupy my mind, I miss the vaquero’s lips on mine, his hands on my body. And when I imagine him with some other woman, a whore perhaps by this time, I am consumed with such a jealous fury I hate myself for feeling so wretched and harboring such ugliness. It is wrong. I had never been this way before I met los tres pistolas.”
“The Guns of Santa Sangre are men of honor, Pilar. They fulfilled their promise. And they took no payment for their deeds because the silver was gone. You must not hate them.”
“Then why do I hurt so much?”
“Because they are your friends.”
“Yes. And I miss them.”
Pilar blinked against the bright sunshine as she stepped out of the makeshift confessional built on the site of the half-rebuilt church on the hill above the village of Santa Thomas. Her people had wasted no time restoring the mission brick by brick and were well underway with the reconstruction of the church and steeple. Already, the spired structure looked humbly majestic atop the hill lording over the huts of the village below. Some men were climbing ladders and whitewashing the adobe façade in front. On the other side villagers carried wood through the great oaken doors to replace pews and transepts of the nave that had been torched in the gunfighters’ showdown with the wolfmen. There was much work still to do. Soon the town people would be able to worship there again.
It had been a month since the battle at the church.
For the first time in her life, Pilar no longer feared the full moon that would come tonight, for a full moon had risen last night, bringing nothing with it but the stars in the sky.
Pilar had been born and raised in the village that now a month later still bore the scars of the werewolves who had enslaved the town and scourged the people. She was just twenty, statuesque and voluptuous beneath her canvas peasant dress, her womanly body firm from manual labor. Pilar was very beautiful and glowed with vitality. Long lush raven-black hair flowed down her broad shoulders and framed her strong and angelic rural Mexican features. People in the village had often said that Pilar resembled the Madonna in the old paintings. Her soulful eyes were a deep and warm brown but the hardness in them was new, for though it had been just a month since the three American gunfighters had ridden off, Pilar had aged years in the shootists’ absence. Four weeks ago, she had been a naive, stout-hearted young village girl when she boldly left her besieged village and with youthful nerve and resolve disguised herself as a boy to hire three gunslingers of the breed she grew up reading about and idolizing in western dime novels. But while the bad men ultimately rewarded her faith and pluck by annihilating the werewolves, in the end she was disillusioned and stripped of her girlish romantic notions for one simple reason ... They left. In their departure, they had taken her innocence with them and that could never be returned.
She brushed a tine of hair out of her eyes blown by the fragrant dusty morning breeze, heart swelling with pride at the busting village life happening all around her—the farmers with the plows, the children with their mothers, the horses and chickens and pigs passing by. She had never thought or dared to hope that things would return to normal for her people in their town after The Men Who Walk Like Wolves had besieged their village in a bloody reign of terror a month before. Already the horror felt like years ago.
Life was back to normal so why did she experience such discontent, Pilar wondered? The answer came quickly to her: the young woman chafed within the confines of her village now, bored with the day-to-day routine in a way she had never been before everything happened, back when she had imagined growing old and dying in Santa Thomas. The village had not changed, she had. It was the fighting, the bullets, the blood, the romance—the thrall she had experienced fighting side by side with the gunslingers vanquishing the monsters—that had changed her. The action was in her blood now. Pilar missed the sting of combat, the tang of gunpowder in her nostrils, the racing of her heart, the pumping of adrenaline in battle. Most of all, she missed Tucker’s hot kisses and the heft of him inside her that one passionate day.
Her little village bored her now. It seemed smaller, constricting, closing in on her more with each passing day. Her blood felt like it was drying up, turning to powder in her veins. And her gaze constantly swept now to the vast desert beyond the town borders, the great big
