Wilder's Mate

Chapter Seven

The sun was low, too low, and Wilder cursed under his breath. According to Archer’s message, this was the right rendezvous point, only he was nowhere to be found.

And darkness was fast approaching.

“Wilder?” Satira sat her horse more easily today, with the reins firm in her gloved hands. She seemed more relaxed in trousers and a rough jacket, though tension threaded her voice now.

Hiding his emotions and thoughts from her was growing harder with each passing day. “Archer’s late.”

“I take it that’s not like him?”

“No.” Not like any bloodhound to leave a comrade stranded in the desert borderlands with dusk fast approaching.

Wilder’s stomach twisted with a sick sense of foreboding.

Satira stripped off her gloves and tucked them behind her belt, then reached for the gun at her hip.

“Do you think something happened to him?”

“Could be.” If he’d tried to set things up for them, he could have gotten—

Really, Harding? You didn’t see it in his eyes? Ignore it when he tried to call you off?

He tightened one hand around his rifle and turned his horse. “Ride, Satira. Back toward town, now.” For one endless moment she stared at him, eyes conflicted. Then she gripped her reins. “You’d best be behind me, Wilder, or I will turn around.”

He started to speak, but the crack of a gunshot stilled his tongue. Wilder dragged Satira closer, heedless of the way her mount whinnied in protest.

Her heart hammered so loud he could hear it clearly, but her fingers found her gun. “Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

There was nothing to do until their foe showed himself. It happened a second later, when a pale, sick-looking man stepped out from behind a bit of scrub.

Satira shivered, her voice low. “Vampire?”

Worse. So much worse. “Ghoul, if I don’t miss my guess.”

“Enthralled to vampires, probably against their will.” She rattled it off so fast it sounded like she was repeating something she’d been told a hundred times. “Levi said to kill them quick.”

Which he would do, if not for one thing. “One ghoul would never come up against a hound. There’s more.”

“Regular bullets or modified?”

The vampire’s blood made them fast, but their bodies… “They’re human enough. Regular bullets work just fine.” He scanned the deepening gloom and spotted two more. “You aim for that one up ahead, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

Satira reached across her body to draw her second revolver, the unmodified one. “I can do it.” No time for assurances, but he gave her one anyway. “You can.” And then he spun and fired off two shots, quick as he could, dropping one of the ghouls. The other ran, so fast he was almost a blur. “Shit.” Gunfire sounded behind him. Satira bit off a curse even more vicious than his, and fired again. Wilder wheeled around in time to see the pale ghoul fall behind the stand of scrub. “Ride, Satira!” She obeyed, one hand tangled in the reins, the other clutching her weapon. The wind whipped her hat off her head before she bent low, barely keeping her seat.

The remaining ghoul shot out of the shadows and reached for her, his hissing face a caricature of what it once must have been. Wilder swung his rifle around and slammed the butt of it into the side of the ghoul’s head with a crunch. The creature fell, seizing, to the dirt.

“Wilder!” Satira lifted her revolver. Four more figures appeared ahead of them, their movements jerky, as if they were fighting the compulsion. Fighting to flee.

Not a battle to be fought on horseback, not for him. He jumped down from his horse and raised his voice to Satira. “Get out of range, and for God’s sake, keep riding if you have to. You can get back to Juliet.”

“No.” She pulled back so hard her horse’s hooves skidded on the dirt, then leveled her pistol and fired with cold deliberation, slamming a bullet into one of the ghoul’s shoulders. “There are too many for you.”

“No there aren’t.” He could take them all, but not with her firing at them—and him. “Stay if you have to, but guard yourself. I can handle this.”

He didn’t wait for her answer. He slung his rifle over his saddlebag and headed toward the ghouls.

Walking first, feeling the magic well up inside him. The new moon was too close, but he had something to replace that animal power.

Satira.

Vanquish. Kill. Protect. The words echoed instincts the danger had awakened. Satira looked at the ghouls and saw him vastly outnumbered, but this was what he was made for.

This was what a hound did.

Wilder broke into a run, roaring as he released the rage, let it flow through him. He hit the first ghoul, knocking him back into two others as a fourth reached for him. Bare hands and fists, but the rage guided him.

Fueled him.

Another wave of attackers crested the small rise, and Wilder let the rage take over.

It was a credit to Levi’s training that Satira kept her revolver from slipping out of her suddenly nerveless fingers.

She’d seen bloodhounds fight. She’d seen Levi, sparring with his young visitors, beating them around the dusty practice yard behind the manor. Once she’d even seen him fight in earnest, when a band of outlaws had set upon the madam of the whorehouse where Satira’s mother had worked. Levi had run the survivors out of town with regret in their eyes and terror in their hearts.

Wilder didn’t seem liable to leave any survivors at all. There was a wild beauty in his precise, deadly movements, in the way he became the fight. No thought, no hesitation.

This was a bloodhound, stripped down to his essence. Violence and death.

Anyone with the slightest lick of sense would be terrified. She’d thought four ghouls were too many for him, but three times that lay scattered at his feet, a sea of still limbs and broken bodies. All quick kills.

No sadism, no pleasure in it.

And it had happened so fast she’d barely gotten off her horse before he laid hands on the last one.

“Wilder, stop!”

At first, she thought he hadn’t heard her. Then he hesitated, one large hand around the ghoul’s throat.

“Kill ’em quick, right?” he rasped.

Wilder’s horse had vanished into the sunset at a reckless gallop. She couldn’t afford to let their only mount escape, so she wrapped the reins around her hand and approached him slowly, unsure if that might startle him into violence. “He might have information. He’ll at least know where he was sent from. Where his master lives.”

Wilder grinned suddenly—feral, chilling. “What do you got in that bag of yours, Satira?” There was the terror, a sick little fear tying her stomach in knots. Wilder wasn’t her gruff companion or her wild lover now—he was a bloodhound.

He was a killer.

Maybe she was something worse, because she had no excuse for answering him except her desperate need to save Nathaniel. “The chemical mixture in my modified rounds would probably burn the skin of anyone who’s under a vampire’s thrall.”

Wilder studied the ghoul. “Do we have to resort to that?”

The ghoul was a man, pale and drawn, with dark hair and bloodshot eyes. At one time there might have been intelligence in his gaze, but now he seemed savage. Mindless. His fingernails scraped at the dirt and he snarled.

“Hand me one of the rounds,” Wilder muttered. “If nothing else, maybe the chemical will break the thrall.”

It took two tries to get her regular gun into its holster. The special rounds glinted in the setting sun as she spilled one into her hand and held it out to him.

He cracked it on a rock and let some of the compound inside drip onto the ghoul’s chest. As soon as it penetrated his shirt, he screamed and arched backwards, booted heels scrabbling against the ground.

Blisters formed on his pale skin, angry red burns that she swore she could smell in the air.

Her nerves felt frayed, unraveling, as she dug her fingers into her palm. “Talk,” she whispered.

Begged. “Tell us where your master is.”

Wilder watched the ghoul in silence for a few long moments, then held out his hand to Satira. “Give me another one.”

No pretending she wasn’t an accomplice to torture. She fixed Nathaniel’s face in her mind as she pressed another round into his gloved palm.

He wrenched open the ghoul’s jaw and shoved the round into his mouth. The glass clattered on his teeth, and Wilder’s lips pressed into a grim line as he placed his hand firmly under the ghoul’s chin. “Talk, or I smash it, and it’ll hurt a hell of a lot worse than what I just did.” Bloodshot eyes rolled up until Satira could barely see anything but white. The ghoul trembled for an endless moment, then jerked his head up and down, beating his fists against the ground.

Wilder yanked the glass round free and sat back. “Talk.”

“Clear Springs.” The words shook. “Fifty miles past the border. He’s taken over the whole town.

Rebuilt the hotel, made it his manor. There’s a lab in the basement. Keeps people there. Inventors.

Hounds.” A shudder. “Us.”

“Inventors.” Wilder bit out the word, his eyes wild. “Is Nathaniel Powell one of them?” The ghoul let out rattling breath, but his whispered response made Satira’s heart leap. “Yes.” One rough breath and then another, and Wilder rose. “Get back, Satira.” It wasn’t a tone that invited questions—or arguments. She obeyed and crossed her arms over her chest in a futile attempt to suppress a shiver. “Are you going to let him go?” In a blink, he pulled his pistol and fired two shots. “They can’t recover,” he said roughly. “That’s why Levi said to kill ’em quick. It’s a mercy.”

“A mercy,” she echoed. Her heart hammered. “Are you all right?”

“No.” His hand trembled, and he holstered the gun.

The world tilted a little as she realized he felt as sick as she did. Bloodhounds were violence, were rage and vengeance, but maybe Wilder was a man too. One with a job he didn’t revel in, but would do regardless.

Not so different than her after all. She stepped forward and lifted a hand to the rigid line of his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“Clear Springs.” Wilder touched her hand, just for a moment. “I know where it is. We won’t make it there before—” He turned away. “We’ll have to stop for the new moon.” For all the numbering of days she’d been doing, that was one date she hadn’t considered. “How soon is it?”

“Tomorrow. After I find my horse, we can backtrack a little tonight, make camp. I know a place we can stop tomorrow night.”

He might as well have dropped her in an icy lake in the midst of winter. A place. A brothel. Where skilled women would give him everything he needed, all the things she hadn’t.

She was six kinds of fool, because a tiny part of her hoped she’d misunderstood. “A hotel?” Wilder shook his head. “Nothing that fancy. It’s an old railroad camp left over from when they tried to lay tracks through these parts. They lit out so fast they didn’t even tear down the shanties.” He didn’t plan to make it easy on her. Satira wet her lips and fixed her gaze on his boots. “Am I—am I enthusiastic enough to heat your blood, or are you hoping to seek out other companionship?” Gloved but gentle fingers lifted her chin until she had to meet Wilder’s eyes. “There isn’t anyone else, Satira.” The words held a light sting of warning.

Not so hard to summon a smile. “It’s not duty, or obligation. I’m not simply willing. I’m eager.” His thumb grazed her cheek, his own smile sudden and relieved. “We should get back. We won’t make it all the way to town, but we can find a safe place to set up camp.”

“It will be all right, Wilder.” She closed her eyes for just a moment and let herself lean into him.

“We’ll get through this. We’ll find Nate.”

“Yeah.” But he sounded bleak.

“We will,” she insisted. “Together, Wilder.”

He closed his arms around her, drawing her close. “We will.” If she kept her eyes closed, she wouldn’t have to see the sprawled bodies, the broken corpses of men whose lives had been destroyed long before Wilder had ended their miserable existence. Vampires were the enemy, the monsters who stole fathers and brothers and turned them into mindless slaves. Who stole sisters and daughters and fed on them, body and soul.

The vampires were the evil ones, but she knew—with something beyond her mind, with an instinct born of caring too much—that Wilder felt like a brutish sadist. Like a nightmare.

Maybe it took evil to fight evil, but it wouldn’t lighten the burden on his soul, or on her own. So she opened her eyes and didn’t shy away from the carnage, fixing it in her mind as the price, one that should never be forgotten. As long as it hurt, it meant they were still on the right side. Wilder didn’t deserve to be shut out in the dark because he did what he had to.

If she had to remind him of that fact, she would. Willingly. Eagerly.