Chapter 13
“It feels off,” Marisol said.
The words came sharp, as hard as the desert wind. Blaze felt them like a shiver along his spine.
They rode low through the dry creek bed, mud-cracked banks towering at their shoulders. The sun beat a flat glare down into the hollow.
“Quiet is bad for the ears out here,” Chato said, his voice soft but sure.
Nancy picked her step carefully, hooves whispering on the grit. Blaze kept his eyes on the bank lines, scanning for the broken brush and flash of hat that meant men.
Anything could happen out here. He liked to think that he was prepared for it all.
“Don’t like the way the light hits the left bank,” Blaze said.
He pulled his hat low, feeling sweat track cold down his temple. The tracks ahead were faint, but fresh hoofprints marred the edge where the Riders might cross.
“Watch the banks,” Marisol spoke up from her saddle. She shifted her rifle, muzzle low and ready. Her stare burned like a coal.
Blaze felt a sudden, raw knot of something in his gut. Maybe it was fear or a hard, bright focus. He tightened his hand on Nancy’s reins and tried to keep her breath even.
It was clear that everybody was on edge. They had been riding for ages, and now it felt like they were crossing into uncharted territory.
“Too many shadows,” Chato murmured.
The Indian eased his white Appaloosa mare ahead a little, listening with his whole body.
Then, the world broke open.
A rifle cracked from the right bank. Nancy screamed a high, terrible cry and bolted, but a second shot punched through her flank.
The horse stumbled, a hot spume of blood washing over Blaze’s leg.
“Down!” Marisol shouted.
Blaze hit the ground hard. The world slid sideways as Nancy pitched and collapsed. The great animal’s weight thudded down across Blaze’s thigh and chest. Sand bit into his palms as he clawed for freedom.
Hot metal screamed in the air. It was gunfire from both banks.
“Get off me!” Blaze yelled, his voice raw with panic.
He dug his fingers between Nancy’s ribs, rocking with everything he had. The horse’s breaths came ragged and short, wild eyes staring into the clouded sky.
Blood pooled warm and slick beneath them. Blaze felt the animal’s muscle spasms against his legs and the sharp shock of a bullet’s heat still hanging in the air.
“They shot at him!” Marisol bellowed.
She fired twice, her rifle cracking and echoing off the banks.
Blaze heard one rider land in a tumble of dust. Another one screamed and pitched forward, hit through the shoulder. Blaze couldn’t see all of it. It was hard to tell how many bandits were surrounding them.
“Stay down!” Chato’s voice came from somewhere on the right.
He had already jumped off his horse and vanished into the scrub, moving like a shadow against the rock.
Blaze felt Nancy shift again. Then her body went still, heavy as a sack. For a stunned moment, Blaze lay there with his face in the sand, lungs burning, every limb screaming.
“Marisol!” he croaked.
Her hands were on him in an instant, fingers tearing at the cinch, at the leather, trying to free him. Bullets knifed the bank above and thudded dirt near their heads. Blaze’s leg was stuck. The taste of iron filled his mouth.
“Hold,” Marisol snapped.
Her voice was a blade. She jerked the reins free with one hand and shoved Blaze hard. He rolled and scrambled, the horse’s dead weight thumping the earth with a dull finality as it toppled fully on its side.
Blaze crawled away from it, dragging his trapped boot free. His limbs burned with effort.
But there was no time to relax.
“Get down!” Chato shouted from the right again.
More shots slashed overhead as Blaze flattened himself on the ground.
He found a hollow behind a half-buried boulder and shoved his back against it, the grit digging into his spine. He tried to breathe normally, and his throat was raw.
His heart hammered like a fist on a door.
“They came out of nowhere,” Marisol said, reloading with machine-quick hands. “It’s an ambush from both directions.”
“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 over the 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.”