Free Stitches: A Werewolf Gunslinger Tale Volume 2 by MT Murphy Page A

People mention how
I’m taller than most of the men folk. Some ask about my
reddish-brown eyes or my Irish brogue. Others tell me that a woman
should find a nice fellow and settle down instead of trekking
across the west by herself. I got used to the comments a long time
ago.
    Stanley’s eyes focused on the two
Walker Colts strapped to my sides.
    “ Them’s some mighty big
hand cannons you got there. Can you really shoot them
things?”
    “ When I have
to.”
    He nodded and draped the rifle over
his shoulder.
    “ It’ll be dark in a couple
of hours. Saloon should have an empty room if you tell them I sent
you.”
    “ I appreciate that,
Stanley. A night’s sleep in a decent bed will do me some
good.”
    “ Yep. You never did say
what brung you here, Lily.”
    “ Just passing through. I’m
heading to Deadwood in the morning.”
    I was unusual and that didn’t sit well
with folks. Most couldn’t handle what they didn’t understand. They
equated different with malicious. The dead man had been even more
unusual than me. I wasn’t convinced that he did the deed. Newcomer
shows up, kills a girl, and gets hanged. It was too damn
matter-of-fact for me.
    I could have left things alone, but it
just didn’t feel right. That little girl deserved justice and
something told me that justice hadn’t been served.
    I wondered what the corpse would have
to say about the situation. The only way to know for sure was to
ask him.
    ***
    I left my room at the saloon about an
hour after sundown. The night crowd was still living it up in the
main hall downstairs. That meant that no one was outside to see me
leap from my second-story window and land silently on the ground
below.
    I wore only a shirt, an old pair of
britches, my boots and my guns. The cold North Dakota air felt
good. There was a full moon out and my blood was
boiling.
    The silver orb in the sky called to
me. I wanted nothing more than to shed my human skin and hunt for
deer in the nearby hills. First I had to see if I was right about
the dead man.
    Stanley told me that the body was
taken to the cemetery outside of town for burial in a shallow grave
away from the main plots. He was half right.
    I found the cemetery easily enough.
The tombstones jutted out of a hill on the road about two miles
from the saloon. Instead of a fresh shallow grave, I found the
corpse lying face-up in a ditch. Either the gravediggers
purposefully disrespected him or they were just plain
lazy.
    The heavy chains still kept his wrists
bound tightly together. I knelt down by him to get a closer look.
His scars were even worse than I had noticed earlier that day. Deep
lines circled his wrists. Similar lines ran down his cheeks and
under his jaw. Great care had been shown in making the scars as
small as possible around his face, but that just meant using
smaller stitches. Areas closest to joints were patched with the
largest stitches to allow some freedom of movement at the expense
of a jagged, disfiguring groove along the flesh.
    Save for the stitches and pallor of
death, his face might have been handsome, though it did seem a
little too small for the rest of his body. The more I looked at
him, the more oddities became apparent. One arm was slightly longer
than the other. His left leg was at least two inches shorter than
the right. He was like a patchwork man pieced together from a
thousand people.
    I was so enthralled in my observation
that I never saw his fists connect with my sternum. One moment he
was dead, the next he sat up and punched me with both hands,
sending me flying. The blow itself was loud, but the cracking sound
my sternum made as it broke was far more sickening to
me.
    I crashed into the ground at least
thirty feet up the hill from the ditch. Pain filled my chest and
blood flooded my mouth. I tried to look back down towards the man,
but I could only see blackness and stars.
    When my vision returned, he was
standing over me. He glanced down at his chains. Then he grasped
the chain