Free Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) by Peter Brandvold Page A

Finally, wanting to keep track of all members of Ortiz’s gang, so she could corral them all later, she pushedout from behind her covering boulder and made her way slowly, weaving among the rocks, toward where the two were grunting and groaning together and making belt buckles and spurs jingle. And then, when she found a nook in the rocks with a good view of the pair, she quirked her mouth corners knowingly.
    The demons were fucking like back-alley curs. Not surprising. Male hobgobbies were even more randy than human men, but they were seldom not outshone by the females of their species.
    One of the two shadows among the moon-silvered mesquites was bent forward over a flat-topped boulder while the other shadow rammed his pelvis against her round, naked bottom. The bell-bottomed charro slacks of Ortiz’s hobgobbie sister, Leonora, were bunched around the young female’s ankles while one of the males from the gang rammed her from behind so hard that he had to hold her hips taut in his gloved hands to keep her from sprawling to the ground.
    Leonora cackled nastily, wildly.
    “Damn fools,” Angel muttered, staying low among the rocks and tufts of Spanish bayonet. “Liable to call the wolves down out of the hills, put us all in one helluva bind.”
    She began to pull her head behind the boulder, but couldn’t quite get her eyes down behind the rock. Something about the pair hammering against each other, the male grunting savagely and the female cackling and hissing Spanish curses, gripping the sides of the rock in front of her, pulled at Angel’s own loins.
    She caught herself, rolling her eyes. Christ, she reckoned it had been too long since her own last tussle. A girl needed a roll in the hay from time to time to keep her mind clear for more important things, like staying alive in known ghoul-haunted lands.
    She studied the pair just finishing now in the mesquites not fifty feet away from her.
    “Mierda!”
Ortiz’s sister said with an angry snarl. “I was nearly there, fool!”
    The male—oddly tall, not so oddly humpbacked, and wearing a wagon wheel sombrero—backed away from her, awkwardly reaching down to pull up his pants, which had been bunched around his boots. “You take too long, Leonora,” he whined in Spanish, in the bizarrely hoarse and high-pitched voice of his kind. The females spoke more like their human counterparts, slightly throatier.
    “You don’t take long enough, Rubio!”
    “Shh! Keep your voice down, woman! You want to let every wolf in the territory know we’re here?”
    Leonora stumbled back, tripped over her slacks, and fell with an indignant yelp and rattle of spur chains. The small gold amulet that she wore around her neck glistened in the velvety moonlight.
    “Leonora!” Rubio reached for her, but she pulled her arm away.
    “Leave me, boy! Who is afraid of a fucking wolf, anyway? I’d like to roast one over the fire tonight. Go back to your friends!”
    “But,
chiquita
…” he whined. He did not leave but stood back in the shadows a ways, his rounded shoulders set with chagrin while the woman dressed, the hump on his back adding to his air of grave defeat as it canted his head downward.
    Finally, Leonora got her slacks pulled back up and her belt buckled, and wrapped her cartridge belt and pistols around her waist. Muttering angrily, she donned her black sombrero, adjustingit carefully on her black-haired head, then stomped through a crease in the hills, heading off toward Angel’s right and out of sight.
    Rubio followed, stumbling drunkenly, hanging his head in chagrin. They were heading in the direction of the singing and the strumming of the mandolin.
    Angel waited. She wanted the entire gang together and in one place before she bore down on them, started planting beads with her Winchester ’73, and commenced blowing their black hearts back to the particular hole in Hell they’d all slithered out of—though some said each hobgobbie was master of his or her own hell.
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