—
Ayatas and Etsi sped to the livery and within seconds were trotting out of town, warming up the horses. As soon as they safely could, they gave the mounts their heads and leaned forward, across the saddle horns, into the night wind.
They passed a man leading a horse. It was limping. Ayatas wanted to shoot the man for abusing the animal. Perhaps on the way back. They passed a second horse, this one lying on the ground, grunting with pain. His leg was broken. They rode past. Ayatas would come back and put the animal out of its misery. They ran for half a mile and walked the animals for half a mile. The lights of the ranch house came into view.
Ayatas and Etsi slowed their mounts. The horses were sweating and blowing, and Ayatas worried about the cannon bone on Etsi’s mount, but the horse wasn’t limping, not yet. Maybe they hadn’t damaged the horse. Through the night air came the sound of shouting and then silence. “The other rider got here just now.” Etsi sounded sad. “They’ll all ride in together, too many for just us to stop. And I doubt the town’s women will have the gumption to face down a well-armed group of men.”
But Ayatas knew men. The sheriff and Turner would not wait for the ranch hands to gather. They would believe that the two of them could handle the town’s women. He slid from his mount and gave the reins toEtsi. “Take the mounts into the brush. I will shift into jaguar. I will herd the horses as they leave the ranch. Spook them. I will take one, you the other.”
She looped the reins to her saddle. “Be careful.”
“ ‘I most certainly will not,’ ” he quoted her.
Etsi laughed like the young girl he fell in love with nearly two decades before. She led the horses into the brush. Ayatas stripped off his clothing and tied it in his scarf, securing the weapons so they would be at hand when he shifted back. Naked, he tied the scarf around his neck, leaving the fetish necklace in place, pulling the heavy bundle uncomfortably tight. Then he sat and called upon the snake in the center of all things, calling upon the life-force of the jaguar in the bones of the fierce beast. He was not moon-called, but it was easier to shift into another shape whengauwatlvyiwas full. It was only two days toGuyequoni—the Ripe Corn Moon of the month the white man called July. His shift was fast and painless.
Ayatas raced to the middle of the street when horses came at a run. Tilted his ear tabs, finding their speed and location with his cat-ears. He squatted, leaving fresh piss in the middle of the street. Then he leaped thirty feet to the top of a pile of boulders and crouched. Waiting. As the horses passed at a hard run, bright silver-green in his cat-night-vision, he growled, the sound rising. He screamed out his big-cat-howl, a chuff of territory claiming, a bellow of sound.
The horses screamed and leaped to the side, shying as they passed over his piss. One tucked its head and began to buck. The other raced off the road. The man on the bucking horse cursed, lost his stirrups, and then the horn. He was tossed high. He landed. The cursing stopped. The horse bucked its way into the night. The man on the ground groaned.
The wind began to rush, fiery with magic. In the distance, Ayatas heard a man scream.
Ayatas trotted to the man, facedown on the ground. It was the sheriff. Ayatas hungered after his shift. It took energy to feed his shape-changing magic. He sniffed the man. He bled. He was injured prey. Ayatas leaned and blew on the sheriff’s neck, growling. The sheriff screamed and tried to pull his gun. Ayatas caught the man in his claws. Flipped him over. Pounced on his chest. The man screamed again. Ayatas chuffed with laughter.
“Stop playing with your food, Aya,” Etsi said. Hungrily, Ayatas tore into the sheriff’s throat. The man died, bleeding out on the dirt, gasping wetly for his last breath. Ayatas sank his fangs into the dead sheriff’s liver. He ate enough to appease the cramping in his own belly. He ripped out the heart and both kidneys, eating voraciously. Had he eaten of a human while in human form, he would have endangered his skinwalker energies, but as a predator cat, he was free from such fears.
Full, he strolled away, leaving many tracks in the blood and in the dirt of the road. In the darkness, he shifted back to human form and dressed. The attack had taken perhaps ten minutes in the white man’s time.
He and his Everhart woman rode on to the ranch and alerted the ranch hands, who were gathering their gear in preparation to follow their boss into town. “Hello the house!” she called as they neared the bunkhouse. “There’s a dead man in the road!”
—
At dawn, a very tired Ayatas and Etsi were in the saloon, sitting at a table in the dark beneath the stairs, sharing a pot of coffee. Etsi was writing her story, a sheaf of paper at her elbow, with pen and inkwell. They were watching and listening to what his Everhart woman called a ruckus.
Two dead men were lying on tables pushed together in the center of the saloon. The rest of the space was taken up by men, drinking and arguing and staying as far away from the women as they could. Because the women were angry and the men were rightfully afraid. The women were being led by Mrs. Smith, formidable even when wounded. All carried loaded weapons. The men had been disarmed.
A mob of armed angry women was a frightful thing to observe, unless one had been raised under the heel ofuni lisiandelisi. Nothing was more frightening than those two in a rage. Ayatas sipped his coffee. It had been served in his own tin cup, to keep his filth from contaminating the cups used by the whites. Ayatas found it amusing and thought that before he left, he might shift into jaguar again and piss into all the cups.
The hands from Carleton’s Buckeye Springs Ranch were all drunk. Other ranchers from the surrounding area stomped the horse manure off their boots and entered, only to be disarmed, surprise on their faces at the sight of women holding them at bay with guns.
The men claimed to be worried about the safety of their stock andchildren, most likely in that order. The undertaker, aware of his audience, measured the bodies for caskets. The doctor (who cut hair and shaved men at the bathhouse) was studying the wounds. He stood and tucked his thumbs into his vest lapels and pronounced, “These men are dead! The new owner of Carleton’s died by a broken neck fallin’ offa horse. The sheriff died by a broken leg that left him game to a...” He raised his voice. “To a marauding mountain lion.”
“We need to track down that mountain lion and shoot it,” a stranger said.
“No!” Mrs. Lamont shouted. The room quieted. “No one will be leaving this saloon until justice is served.”
Amandine walked slowly into the saloon, and the place went as silent as the dead men. She stood straight, her bruises purpled and scarlet. She looked around the room as the other women moved to cover the exits with their bodies and their guns.
“You all know me,” Amandine said. “You know that I was married fast to a man who appeared to be all that was ever in a girl’s dreams. Then my father died, and it was proved to me that the man I thought loved me was a flimflam man. Now he is dead. According to my father’s will, the ranch is mine. Is that understood?”
The men around her nodded. Two men edged toward the doors.
Mrs. Lamont aimed at them. “I can fire twice before you get out and I won’t feel bad for shooting you in the backs.”
They stopped.
“My husband sold me two nights past to Ramon Vicente, the owner of the saloon.” Several of the men in the group leaned in to study her face. “He and two of my former ranch hands abused my body and my person. Vicente is dead. The ranch hands who abused me are Jimmy Jon Akers and Slim Tubbers.”
The two men bolted. Mrs. Lamont raised her shotgun and coldcocked one. The other was tripped. One woman sat on him, another beat his head against the floor. A third kicked his side so hard the snap of broken ribs could be heard across the room. Etsi laughed. She was taking notes as fast as her pen could flow across the paper.
