A Lady of the West (2 page)

“Duncan!” Their mother, Elena, bolted from the bedroom she shared with their father. Raw terror was in her voice as she called out to her husband, who was downstairs. She stared at her sons, then grabbed them to her. “Stay here,” she commanded.

At thirteen the boy was already taller than his mother. “I'm going to help him,” he told her, and turned toward the stairs.

“No!” She seized his arm. “Stay here! I
order
you to. Take care of your brother. I'm going downstairs to your father. I'll find out what's going on and come back to tell you.
Promise me!
Promise me you'll stay here!”

“I can take care of myself.” Her younger son thrust out his jaw. He was as fierce as his brother. She stared at him for a second, trailing her hand down his face.

“Stay here,” she whispered, and ran.

They had never disobeyed a direct order from their mother. They stood in the hallway, anxious because they didn't know what was happening and furious because they wanted to be a part of it. The booming sound of pistol shots and the crack of rifle fire vibrated through the big house. There were shouts and curses from below, footsteps running, glass shattering.

Then a scream splintered through the noise. It rose to a shriek, then fractured into a raw, deep wail. It was their mother.

The older boy bolted for the staircase, but an abrupt sense of caution kept him from hurtling down the steps. He threw himself to the floor, and eased his head around the railing so he could see what was going on.

A man lay sprawled in the entrance foyer, only the top part of his body visible from where the boy lay. Even though half the face was gone, the boy could tell it was his father. An icy feeling of disbelief began spreading through his body. His mother had thrown herself on her husband's body and was still wailing in that awful way. As the boy watched, a man reached down and grabbed his mother's arm, dragging her away from the body. As he did so, the lamplight fell across his face. The boy froze. It was Frank McLain, one of his father's men.

“Get the kids, too.” McLain's voice was low, but the boy heard him. “Make sure they're dead.”

Elena shrieked and threw herself at him, her nails scoring his face. McLain cursed, then drew back his fist and hit her on the side of the head, knocking her to the floor. “Get the boys,” he said again, and bent to the woman.

The boy scrambled backward and grabbed his brother. “Run!” he hissed.

The house was their home; they knew every inch of it. Knowing that their rooms would be the first places searched, they went instead to the corner back bedroom,
the guest room, which had a small balcony over the inner courtyard.

“I'll go first,” the older one whispered, and swung his legs over the side of the balcony. He gripped the black iron railing and eased down until he was hanging above the ground, then let go. It was only about a six-foot drop, one they had made many times in their rowdy games. He landed as lightly as a cat and immediately blended into the dark cover of the shrubbery that grew close against the walls. There was a quiet thump, and his brother joined him.

“What's going on?” the younger boy whispered.

“Pa's dead. It was McLain who did it. He's got Mother.”

There was still sporadic gunfire, as people loyal to Duncan Sarratt and the Peralta family tried to fight. The boys crept around the wall, staying in the shadows. Their rifles were in the study, where they put them each day after carefully cleaning them. They had to get them. The inner ice was still spreading through the older boy; he kept seeing his father sprawled on the dark floor, with half of his face missing.

Their mother's screams grated through the cold night air.

They crawled in through the kitchen door. Inside, their mother's screams were louder, hurting their ears. She was still in the foyer, and they could hear thickly muttered curses, too.

The boy knew, and he went even colder. He was thirteen, and he knew. He rose to his feet, moving as silently as a young panther. He saw a gleam of steel on the kitchen table, and his hand automatically closed on the long-bladed kitchen knife.

The screams were only moans now, and growing weaker. When the boy walked into the foyer, he saw McLain rising to his knees between Elena's legs, pulling out of her body. His pants were open and lowered over his buttocks, his shrinking penis glistening
wetly. His pistol was still in his hand. With a faint smile, he put the barrel to the woman's head and pulled the trigger.

An inhuman howl clogged the boy's throat, but he was ice clear through now. He threw the knife, his aim sure, practiced through many hours of play. McLain saw only a movement in the shadows, and he dodged to one side, just enough that the blade went through his shoulder instead of his heart. He bellowed for help and struggled to his feet just as the boy's weight hit him, knocking him back to the floor. The jarring impact made him scream in pain, and the cold floor scraped his bare ass. The boy jerked the knife free, and the bloody blade slashed downward, toward the man's exposed privates. McLain screamed and tried to roll away. The movement of his body deflected the knife enough that it gouged a shallow slit in his upper thigh. With a feral snarl, the boy withdrew the blade and tried again, this time with a low, sideways movement of his arm. The knife gleamed both silver and scarlet, then McLain knew hot, burning, choking agony as the steel sliced into his ball sac.

He shrieked, mad with pain and fear. He rolled and tried to kick, but his legs were tangled in his lowered pants. He'd never known terror before, but now it congealed his blood. He couldn't stop screaming as he tried to evade that slashing knife. In the flickering light he could catch only glimpses of the boy's face, and it was wild.

“I'll cut your goddamn cock off and feed it to you,” the boy whispered savagely, and McLain heard him even over the shrill hysteria of his own screams.

A shot deafened them, and the boy was slammed sideways. The knife clattered to the floor, but the boy wasn't down. He scrambled awkwardly toward the kitchen, and the other boy, the younger one, darted forward to help him.

“Kill them!” McLain shrieked, clutching his bleeding
balls with both hands. “Kill those little bastards!” He rolled on the floor, his britches still around his knees, and hatred for that Sarratt whelp swelled in his throat until he nearly choked. He whimpered, too terrified to move his hands and see what kind of damage the knife had done, but blood was dripping from between his fingers, and he realized he could bleed to death. Still whimpering, shaking, he lifted one bloody hand and moaned aloud. His penis was still there, but the left side of his sac was a mangled mess. He didn't know if he'd lost his left testicle or not.

God damn him, the bastard had nearly castrated him! He'd wipe the face of the earth clean of Sarratts, he'd skin that boy and leave him for the buzzards. But even as he thought of all the things he wanted to do, McLain knew he'd never forget the choking terror and pain, the humiliation of rolling on the floor, his britches down, while that knife darted and slashed.

 

The boys lay in the small cave they'd discovered five years before, on the northern edge of Sarratt's Kingdom. The pain rolled through the older boy, shaking him, making him grind his teeth together in an effort to stifle his moans. His brother lay still, too still, beside him. The older boy whimpered from the effort it took him to lift his arm and put his hand on his brother's chest, to feel the rise and fall of his breathing.

“Don't die,” he whispered into the cold darkness, though he knew the younger boy was unconscious. “Don't die. Not yet. We've got to kill McLain.”

His younger brother had taken a bullet high in his left side. The older boy didn't know how they had managed to escape, but like wounded animals they had crawled away into the darkness. He himself had two wounds, one in his right thigh, another through the fleshy part of his waist. Blood drenched his shirt
and pants, and he could feel himself weakening, his head becoming light from the pain and blood loss.

Dimly he realized they might die here.

“No,” he said, and touched his brother's still form again. “No matter what, we have to get McLain. No matter what. I swear it.”

M
ajor Frank McLain stepped into the sun and watched the buggy approach, his eyes narrowed with anticipation.

She was finally here.

Fierce, gloating satisfaction filled him. He'd never been good enough before, but now a damned Waverly would be his wife. Her mother was even a Creighton—Margaret Creighton—and the girl had the Creighton looks herself, all pale, calm elegance, and aristocratic bones.

Victoria Waverly. Before the war her family would have spit on him. Now she was marrying him because he had money and all they had were empty bellies and impeccable bloodlines. The war and the hunger it had created were the world's greatest equalizers. The Waverlys and the Creightons hadn't blinked twice at marrying their daughter to him in exchange for a more comfortable life.

He could barely wait. He'd wrenched this land from the Sarratts with blood and death and pure guts, and made it his; he now owned more land than any plantation owner in the South ever had, made his
name one to be reckoned with in the territory, ran more cattle and employed more men than anyone else around, and still something had been lacking. He'd never gotten what he'd wanted more than anything else in his life, and that was a lady at his table, a true aristocrat to share his name. There had never been any hope of it before, but after the war he'd gone back to Augusta, back to the town where he'd grown up as poor and despised white trash. He'd searched there for the perfect woman of his dreams, and he'd found Victoria. His heart beat faster just thinking about her. He had waited four months for her to arrive, and now she was here. They would be married that night.

One of the men standing behind him shifted to get a better look. “Who's that in the buggy with her?”

“Her little sister and her cousin, Emma Gann, came with her,” McLain answered. He didn't mind that Victoria had brought some family with her. He kind of liked the idea of having them under his roof. Men from all over the territory would probably come to court them. White women were still a rarity, and true
ladies
were as precious as gold. He had a pleasant moment's thought of the alliances he could forge with advantageous marriages for the two young women. By God, he'd build an empire that would make the Sarratts look like two-bit dirt farmers. Twenty years had passed since he'd killed the last of them and taken the land, but he still hated the name. Duncan Sarratt had always looked at him as if he were trash, and that bitch Elena had acted as if he'd dirtied the air she had to breathe. But he'd gotten both of them, made them pay, and now he lived in the Sarratt house. No, goddamn it, it was
his
house, just as it was his land. There were no Sarratts anymore. He'd made sure of it.

The half dozen men standing behind him were, in a way, just as eager for the buggy to roll to a stop. Oh, there were some white whores in Santa Fe if they wanted to ride that far, but all of the women on the ranch or anywhere nearby were Mexican. The few
white women in Santa Fe who weren't whores were the wives of soldiers, or the odd rancher's wife. These women coming in now were supposed to be good women, but only the Major's wife would be off-limits. Hell, they all knew him. If he wanted to plow his wife's sister, he'd do it and not think twice. So they watched the approaching buggy with hot eyes, wondering what the women would look like, not that it mattered.

Will Garnet spat on the ground. “The Major is acting like a fool over this woman,” he muttered. “Ain't no split-tail born worth this much fuss.”

The few men who heard him agreed, but didn't say anything. Only two men on the spread were immune to the Major's rage, and Garnet was one of them. He was in his early forties, with dark hair graying at the temples, and he had been with the Major from the first. He was the foreman and did pretty much as he wanted, with the Major's blessing. They all walked lightly around him, except the man standing a little away from their group, his posture relaxed and his eyes cold under the brim of his hat. Jake Roper had only been on the ranch a few months, but he, too, seemed immune to the Major's anger.

They had all been hired as cowpunchers or wranglers, but it was a fact that some of them had been hired more for their handiness with a sidearm than for their bulldogging ability. A man who had made his fortune the way McLain had needed to keep an eye out for his enemies. Not only that, but a spread as big as his was vulnerable to rustling and lightning raids by the Comanche. So McLain had built his own private army of gunmen, and Jake Roper was the fastest. Even the other gunhands tended to steer clear of him. Garnet might have a mean streak in him a mile wide, but Roper was ice clear through. Garnet might backstab a man, but Roper would squash out a life with as little thought as if he'd stepped on a bug.