Night of the Wolves

Alex nodded. That much was true. She would definitely feel safer with the men who had successfully defied the outlaws staying in her boardinghouse.

Suddenly her smile of agreement froze on her face.

She had just watched Cody Fox decapitate a dead man.

With the blessing—no, at the insistence of—of Jim Green.

She realized she was exhausted. No doubt the world would look normal again after a good night’s rest.

“I think I have to go to sleep,” she told Beulah.

“You need to have something to eat, child,” Beulah said.

Alex laughed. “Beulah, you’re a sweetheart, but I’m too tired to eat. I’m going to go up to bed now, and I’ll worry about what’s going on in the morning.”

“It’s the devil,” Beulah said, nodding sagely.

Alex took Beulah’s hands. “I saw the devil’s work when anger and hostility entered the hearts of men and sent them to war.” Her eyes grew sad. “I guarantee you, God has no part in the carnage of war. Whatever this is, we can fight it, and we will.”

“Maybe. Now that they’ve come,” Beulah agreed, then added, “But maybe not. This evening they came in a roar of gunfire. But sometimes they come in stealth and quiet, slipping into our lives and our souls—like the devil. Please, Alex, you heard what Cody Fox said to them fancy girls. It’s time to be smart and careful.”

Alex gave Beulah a hug. “I’ll be careful, I swear,” she promised, and headed for the stairs. Just dragging herself up the steps suddenly seemed like a tremendous effort.

She made it to her room. Her father’s room. No, her room now, as he would have wanted it to be.

One of the girls had laid out her nightdress, and left her a basin of water on the washstand. By rote, she carefully removed and hung her clothing, washed up and slipped on the nightgown. She dipped her hands into the water again to refresh her face, and caught her reflection in the mirror. In the white gown and the lamplight, she appeared gaunt and pale. As if she were some kind of wraith. Despite herself, she found herself thinking of the women in the saloon. Dolly, who was so … assured. That new girl, oddly pretty and fresh. She paled in comparison. She winced. How odd! She wasn’t accustomed to feeling insecure.

She turned again to her reflection and realized she was comparing herself to others because …

Because of Cody Fox.

A flood of red heightened her cheeks as she continued staring into the mirror.

She took her towel and patted her face dry, and turned quickly away from the mirror, feeling ridiculous. The world had gone crazy—and she was worried about being noticed by a man. She definitely needed sleep. Ever since Grant’s death, she hadn’t even thought about men except when she’d volunteered at the hospital, where they’d simply been sad and scared human beings longing to die with the warmth and comfort of a woman’s hand clutching their own.

Maybe that was it. It had simply been so long since she had buried her fiancé, so long since she had even thought about appearances, attraction … and then a man like Cody Fox came along and suddenly she was seeing herself as a woman again.

Alex let out a sigh of irritation, blew out the lamp and crawled into bed.

Darkness, exhaustion. They would surely allow her to rest.

But she found that her eyes were drawn to the double French doors that led from the master suite to the balcony. The moon wasn’t full, but still there was a flood of light falling to earth from the heavens, a yellow glow permeating the world beyond her windows, making its way through the drapes.

Bathed in that glow, shadows moved. They looked like the wings of birds, giant birds dancing in the air beyond the window. She almost thought she could hear the rush of wings, but she knew it was only the sound of the wind as it rushed over the plain.

She forced herself to close her eyes, and at last she slept.

THEY WERE IN THE ACT of burying the decapitated man when the sheriff and his deputy made it back into town at last.

The sheriff, Cole Granger, was a tall, hard-muscled man with sharp blue eyes and hair so dark it had a blue sheen in the moonlight. His deputy, Dave Hinton, was smaller, but he had a solid handshake and steady eyes.

Jim Green explained what had happened when Milo and his band of outlaws had come to town.

“These fellows saved us, and that’s a fact,” he said, then cleared his throat, kicking at the freshly dug mound of earth below his feet. “Honest, Cole, we weren’t being cowards—we just didn’t know what to do, you know? Ace Henley got this fellow, though. We don’t have a name for him, don’t know nothing about him. But we’ve taken care of him—and we’ve buried him deep.”

“Damn it, damn it all straight to hell!” Granger said, sounding disgusted with himself. “I shouldn’t have ridden out, and I sure as hell shouldn’t have taken Dave with me.” He looked Cody and Brendan in the eyes. “Thank you. I don’t know how the hell you did it, but thank you. There’d been trouble out at John Snow’s trading post—and I had to get out there, see what was going on. But I didn’t count on getting back so late.”

“We hit some trouble on the return,” Dave said.

“Trouble? What happened?” Cody asked.

“Darnedest thing,” Cole said, shaking his head. “We were coming through a patch of brush and trees about five miles from here when the horses just went crazy. Go figure. We’ve both been riding since before we could walk, and first we lose Dave’s horse, and he’s running around like a headless chicken till I can catch him and start to get him settled. Next thing you know, my Titan is rearing and snorting, and starting Dave’s horse going again. There was something out there, but damned if I know what. Wolves, coyotes, something. All I know is, I’ve never seen horses acting up so badly.” Cole stopped speaking and looked Cody in the eye again. “Everyone is saying the devil is loose in these parts. I don’t know what the devil is, but there’s sure as hell something going on. Something that lets Milo and his crew annihilate whole towns. I figured they’d be coming for us sooner or later. It’s just sooner than I expected.” He looked from Cody to Brendan, and back to Cody. “How the hell did you stop him?”

“I know Milo’s type,” Cody said. “I know how to make him believe that he’ll lose his own life if he doesn’t listen to me. I know this kind of enemy.”

“We finished decapitating the dead man,” Jim Green put in nervously.

Cole set a hand on Jim Green’s shoulder. “If you feel it was necessary, Jim, then that’s fine.”

“Absolutely right,” Dave agreed, shaking his head strenuously. Cody and Brendan exchanged a look. It was obvious that Dave thought the very devil was walking the streets.

Cole Granger was a harder man altogether, and his attitude said he’d seen his share of vicious men. He clearly still believed that he was dealing with something real and tangible.

“With everything going on out here,” Cody said, “haven’t you gotten any help from the army or the U.S. Marshals?”

Cole Granger shook his head. “If we’d ever suspected we could all be wiped out this way, we might have gotten together and mustered up a militia. As to government help … Texas is part of the Confederacy, and the Confederacy has lost too many men to have any left to send out here. Our only help might come from Chief Tall Feather and the Apaches, and maybe some of his Comanche friends. At least we don’t have problems with the Indians out here. They live their lives, we live ours, and we trade. They say an evil spirit has come to earth and possessed the souls of men. I don’t know what it is, only that I’m not running and I will see these killers stopped.”

“How’d you know about the trouble out here?” Dave asked suddenly.

“I have family out here—or I did,” Brendan said, correcting himself. “And Cody’s folks lived in these parts. His father died out here.”

Cody shrugged.

“My mother went home—back to New Orleans—before I was born. But the important thing is that we’re here to help you fight. Tomorrow, as a matter of fact, if it sits well with you, Sheriff, I’m going to go out and meet that Indian chief. You say his name is Tall Feather?”

“That’s right. He’s a good man, even though the Apache are a warrior clan. Tall Feather sees the way the world is going. He says the Spirit Fathers have told him that the white man will not go away, that he will come in greater numbers. If you can’t fight them, in his opinion, you should study them and figure out how to use them. Go ahead and talk to him—he’ll tell you what’s been going on.”

“What did you find out at the trading post?” Cody asked Cole, changing the subject.

Cole shook his head. “Two of John Snow’s children have gone missing, both of them beautiful young girls. But I couldn’t find a trail, not a drop of blood, not a broken branch. It’s as if the girls wandered into another dimension.”

“I’ll try to get out that way, too,” Cody said. “So where do Milo and his band hole up during the daylight hours?”

“No one knows,” Dave said.

“Brigsby, I’m thinking,” Cole said. “But I haven’t had a chance to get back out there to check. We had a gunslinger go through here a few weeks back, and he thought he was tougher than solid stone. He went out to Brigsby. We found what was left of his body on the ground out by where the horses went crazy on Dave and me.”

“We need to get out there as soon as we can manage it,” Cody said. “I’d like to be sure what we’re up against. Men like Milo … they can deceive, build traps. We need to find out everything we can if we’re going to fight them. Anyway, Sheriff, what you and your deputy here need to be doing is warning your townsfolk not to open their doors to strangers—and especially not even to be on the streets at night. I tried to tell the girls at the saloon that it was important to be … cautious, but that may have been a lost cause. Thing is—” Cody broke off, hesitating. The thing was, Cole Granger was going to have to accept some of the truth of the matter—or else the sheriff would be running him out of town before he could count to three.