“How the hell did they find us?” Blaze asked nobody in particular.
It wasn’t like anybody could give him the answers anyway.
Marisol’s face was hard as flint. She rose and let off two deadly rounds down the right bank. A rider twisted and fell, the ridge swallowing his shout.
“One down,” Chato said, voice low. He returned like a ghost from the scrub, knife glinting. He had a smear of something dark across his sleeve. “One here.”
“More on the right!” Marisol warned.
Blaze peered past the rock and saw men moving with their rifles pounding out a rhythm of death.
It was hard to count how many had found them. There had to be more than five.
However, they couldn’t have all been in Wilder’s immediate gang. Blaze couldn’t remember seeing this many men when they surrounded Buckeye Ranch.
The Riders were masked by the scrub, cowled shapes firing with the casual cruelty of trained killers. He pulled his Colt free, and his thumb fumbled the cylinder.
“Shoot!” Marisol barked.
He raised the revolver and fired. The world narrowed to the recoil in his shoulder and the smell of burnt powder. He’d never felt a shot like that. It was close, real, and meant to end.
A rider’s arm jerked as Blaze’s bullet found shoulder or chest. The man staggered, then collapsed into the sand with a wet, choking sound.
“You hit him!” Chato said.
The pain in Blaze’s hands was less than the crazed triumph that swelled hot in his gut. He’d wounded a man. The rider on the ridge below him swore and fired back, a bullet whistling overthe rock and nicking shrapnel off the boulder next to Blaze. Sand sprayed in his face.
“Keep him low!” Marisol ordered, ducking behind another outcrop. She rose again and opened up from the left bank, her Hawken Plains rifle barking with a deadly rhythm.
A man tumbled from the ridge like a puppet cut from strings.
“Two!” Chato called. “Two down.”
He didn’t wait to celebrate. He vanished into the scrub again with a silent, fluid motion and came up on the flank of another rider just as the man swung a pistol.
Chato’s knife flashed in a bare, brutal arc, and the man crumpled with a surprised sound.
“Graycloud!” Marisol cried, her voice a mix of relief and fury.
The desert went hot with it. The shock, the adrenaline, the smell of singed hair and gunpowder and blood. Blaze tasted copper on his tongue, and the world tilted.
“You alright?” Chato yelled, kneeling at Blaze’s side.
In response, Blaze pushed himself up on shaking arms. His joints were screaming. He looked down. Blood darkened his boot where Nancy had hit him. His leg was bruised, grazed, but not broken.
The mare was dead. His chest heaved, his lungs working like bellows.
“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “My leg’s—”
A sharp, hot pain seared up his calf. He bit back a curse and wrapped his hands around his thigh.
“How many?” Blaze asked, counting with his breath. “How many are left?”
“Three,” Marisol said. She wiped grit from her cheek with a sleeve, her eyes narrowing. “Two on the right bank, one took a hit but crawled.”
“They won’t last,” Chato said. “We move fast.”
Chapter 14
