always be a woman of faith.
Then she pushed past the blanket covering the doorway into the hot valley sunlight and stepped outside.
No words were spoken by Pilar, her carriage erect as she strode through the parting crowd toward the stable. Vaulting the fence, she threw saddle and tack over the strongest horse though it wasn’t hers, belted it sure, stowed her two rifles in the saddlebags, and swung into the saddle. Digging her heels into the flanks of the stallion, the woman galloped straight for the fence and jumped the horse over it. Galloping down the dusty dirt street of the village, Pilar charged swiftly up the steep ridge leading out into the Durango desert badlands and rode away out of town into the desert. Due north.
The wind felt good in her face.
The guns felt good in her holsters.
It was good to be in action again.
Her friends were in danger. They had saved her people. Now it was her turn to save them.
And if in the attempt she died, it would be in Tucker’s arms.
Azul raised her hand.
The riders pulled up their horses with brutal jerks of the reins and stopped on the dusty hot desert flats, an inhuman vista of scorched desert beneath unrelieved skies. The view was shimmering. The bandits watched their feral leader sitting tall in her saddle, turquoise eyes alert beneath windblown hair, nose raised, nostrils flaring animalistically.
She sniffed the air.
Sniffed again, detecting a scent.
Her head snapped east.
Digging her spurs savagely into her cowed stallion’s flanks, Azul charged without delay in that direction followed by the galloping horde of hairy bandits on lathered horses. Soon they were completely lost to sight in the desolate wastes. When the curtain of settling dust died down it was as if the werewolves were never there, vanished spirits in the heat distortion rising up in melting waves off the baking tundra.
Several miles up the trail, the charred embers of the campfire were still warm to the touch when Azul dismounted and touched them with her fingers.
Her bandits remained on their horses in the ravine beneath the hot crush of the sky watching the bandita hunkering down on powerful lupine haunches. Her trousers stretched taut on her buttocks. Her boots creaked with their tough leather of stripped tanned human hide. Running her tapered fingers through the dirt, Azul picked up a handful of soil, brought it to her nose and sniffed. A satisfied glint of recognition flashed fiercely in her feral gaze from the tang she smelt. Then her brutally beautiful face broke into a ravishingly razor sharp grin as she rose and stood to face the other wolfmen now in human form.
“Three were here. The three who killed my brother. I smell our blood mingled with the weak stink of their man sweat.” Azul dropped the handful of soil and wiped her hands together coating them with dirt to bring her elementally closer to Father Earth. “One was wounded and his blood tainted but he did not turn in last night’s moon. Three manflesh rode out this morning. They are not far and their sign is fresh. By tonight’s moon we will catch up to them and feast on the marrow of their bones. Ride!”
With a hideous savage whoop, the bandita sped in a loping stride to the rear of her petrified horse and vaulted over its rump into the saddle. Twisting her hips, wrenching the steed between her powerful legs, she dug both spurs and drove her horse in such a sharp turn the animal toppled and collapsed onto its side. Dust kicked up. Staying in her saddle, Azul forced the injured horse up onto its staggering legs, reared it up on its hind haunches and galloped headlong into the desert. Werewolves took no care with horses and rode them until the animals dropped dead. If the other horses seemed ready to keel, the lycanthropes would tear the head from the shoulders of the horse that dropped and this sight would strike such mortal terror in the other animals they would carry their pitiless riders another fifty miles without complaint until they too fell, hearts exploded from exhaustion and fear.
Tall in the saddle, Azul kicked her horse into motion. She gestured to the east and beckoned her men on, urgently, impatiently. The werewolves began to string out as they increased speed across the valley floor. Azul cast a savage glance back at her six bandits hurtling on horseback behind her. The full moon was already a ghostly wisp in the thickening twilight of the vast El Diablo sky. Below it, the bandita charged across the bleached bone expanse of Mexican desert wastes, blood up, so close to her hated prey she could taste them.
She would taste them, oh yes.
And soon.
Miles away in El Diablo, Tucker caught the silver bullet that Fix pitched him. He gripped it meaningfully in a gloved fist. “You sure about this?” he said.
Fix nodded tersely.
“You?” Tucker asked, swiveling his flinty gaze to Bodie for confirmation.
The big Swede cracked a broken grin. “Hell yeah, I’m sure.”
“It’s your asses if you’re wrong.”
“If’n you was gonna turn into one of them werewolves, you woulda done last night during the first full moon’n I would have put that slug through your heart directly. Like we all agreed.” The taut little shootist Fix shrugged. “A full moon is a full moon. Stands to reason if’n you didn’t turn into no hairy sumbitch then, ya ain’t gonna turn into one tonight. Trust me pardner, if’n you had started howling last night we wouldn’t be having this here conversation because you best believe, friend or no, I would not have hesitated.”
Tucker didn’t doubt him; his pal’s saturnine expression made that plain and clear.
The three tough rugged American gunfighters tugged the handkerchiefs over their faces below their Stetsons, sitting erect in their saddles of three horses on the ridge of the tall ravine looming high above the railroad tracks below. Their loaded six-guns were drawn.
The trio of shootists known as The Guns of Santa Sangre were in the bowels of El Diablo, which meant The Devil in Spanish and was an apt moniker for this dangerous hell hole of a place: a forbidding barrier range of monolithic canyon massifs, towering cliffs and plummeting gorges stretching hundreds of miles in all points of the compass, great super plateaus and bottomless crevasses that gave way to blasted desert oblivion—a true no man’s land. In the west, the dying sun setting over the jagged crags spread a deepening sanguine glow that bled lengthening crimson shadows, colors of the range’s satanic namesake, across a hostile and pitiless terrain. Purple shadows of twilight dappled the colossal gorge. The sun was low, a faint ghost of the full moon in the dim.
A railroad line ran through El Diablo. It was the only way through it. The outlaws had taken position out of sight behind big rocks in the ramparts high atop the rambling system of canyons and would not be spotted by the train when it came.
They wanted to get in and get out.
The desperadoes were armed to the teeth and braced for action, pumped with adrenaline, but had nothing to do but wait for the train to show. So, they jawboned to take the edge off before the shooting started.
“I know you would have shot me through the heart, Fix,” Samuel Tucker
