Free Warriors of the Night by Kerry Newcomb

blessed me with an abundance of fat, noisy chickens. You must stop by and see Carmelita and tell her to choose a couple for you.”
    “You are very good to us,” Señora Flores replied, bowing to kiss his hand. Esteban embraced her. “I wish that I could repay your kindness.” The woman lifted her narrow, tear-streaked face.
    “Repay God, dear woman. Be generous with prayer, eh? God uses me. The glory is His.”
    “Still, yours is a kind heart.”
    “Go on now.” Esteban shushed her along. “I think Carmelita may even have some pan dulce for the children.”
    The little girls clapped their hands and hurried back down the aisle of the church to the front doors, their footsteps clattering on the tile. When they and the señora were gone, the peon kneeling before the statue of the Virgin stood and faced the priest.
    “Such a good and gentle man to be the son of a bloodthirsty bandit like the tiger of Coahuila.”
    The voice was hoarse and strikingly familiar. Father Esteban gasped and spun around, half expecting to see his father standing in the shadows. Indeed the man in the shadows even looked like Don Luis. He had roughly the same build—tough, solid, thick-waisted, with short, well-muscled arms. His black hair was streaked with silver. In his forty-ninth year, the man’s features were crinkled and leathery from a life spent chasing Comanches and raiding the homesteads and settlements of families both light-skinned and dark who dared to call themselves Texans.
    As the man stepped forward out of the alcove, Esteban sighed with relief. He had not encountered an apparition of his father, after all.
    The priest’s happiness was short-lived, however, for the bandit disguised as a humble peon was none other than Jorge Tenorio. If Don Luis Cordero had been El Tigre, Jorge Tenorio had been the claws. A man of striking contradictions, Tenorio could bounce a child on his knee, cooing and playing, and in the next instant shoot the father of the child stone-cold dead. It was not that Tenorio was a brutal man, but years of living with a gun in his hand had taken their toll. To his compadres, no man was more steadfast and loyal, but his enemies called him a ruthless butcher. Somewhere in between was the man who had bounced young Esteban Cordero on his lap and taught him to ride.
    “Tenorio…” Esteban said. “ Madre de Dios , how many more survived the battle with the Rangers?”
    The old cutthroat shrugged and smiled as he sauntered forward, his spurs clinking with every step.
    “Tomas, Chico, and Miguel, who I sent on to see you and Señorita Cordero. And Miguel’s brother Hector. The man does not live who can outshoot or outride Hector Ybarbo.” Tenorio grinned and patted the bulge of a gun butt beneath his blousy cotton shirt. “Except me.” He scratched at the week-old stubble prickling his jaw. If he’d let his beard grow it would have come in mostly silvery-white, with just a smattering of black. Tenorio was sensitive about his age. He wanted a shave more than anything. He knew a barber across the river in La Villita, the oldest section of town, and was anxious to pay the man a visit.
    “What do you want here?” Esteban asked.
    “Sanctuary, what else?” Tenorio said, his eyes wide with innocence.
    “And you shall have it,” Anabel interjected, entering the church from a side door that opened onto a thatch-covered walk connecting the church to the priest’s house. Anabel was followed by Miguel Ybarbo and his brother Hector, who was older than Miguel by a few years and wiser by twenty, or so it seemed. Where Miguel was headstrong and vengeful and too quick to act, Hector was a calming influence. He wore the loose-fitting cotton shirt and trousers of a field hand, but he kept a pistol tucked in his boot top just to be on the safe side. His black hair was close-cropped though ragged-looking; his mustache was a shaggy black scrawl that hid his upper lip and hung to his chin.
    Esteban shifted and looked past