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“One of who?”
“Centaurs,” the man said, his voice faltering. “They hit us a couple of hours ago and stole a passel of our horses. And they killed—”
“How’d they get the horses?” Bartram snapped. “Didn’t you have hobbles on ’em?”
“I don’t know, Butch! It all happened so fast it was hard to tell. I reckon maybe they clipped the hobbles with their lances. They killed Whittaker.”
Bartram scanned the scene of destruction and saw that Whittaker wasn’t the only one who’d been killed. He counted seven bodies in total, some lying face up, others face down, their backs bristling with arrows.
A few yards away, another man with an arrow through his gut was wailing like a banshee while a couple of his companions crouched over him, attempting to feed him some whiskey to kill the pain. Bartram got down off his horse and approached them.
“Shut him up,” he snarled. “You want everything in creation to know we’re here?”
“Too late for that,” the man holding the bottle said. “They already know. Where you been anyway, Butch?”
Bartram ignored the question. He shoved the man with the bottle away and knelt beside the wounded man. Lacerda was his name. The arrow had pierced his abdomen, but it had failed to pass through to the other side. There was no way to extract it without pulling the man’s entrails out in the process. If they’d been in town, maybe they could have done something for him, but not out here in the desert.
“Easy,” Bartram purred as he placed his hands on either side of the man’s knobby skull. “Easy now…”
A quick twist was all it took, just like wringing a chicken’s neck. The wailing stopped, and the others flinched away.
“Jesus, Butch,” somebody said.
“He wasn’t going to make it. Just saved him a couple hours of hurting.”And saved our ears from having to listen to him, Bartram thought but didn’t say. “Go put them fires out. Sun’ll be up soon, and the smoke will be even more visible than the fires are. Where’s Flarity?”
“Here,” a voice growled behind him. “Where the hell haveyoubeen?”
Bartram stood and turned around. As usual, Flarity had a cigar burning, and his face was bunched up in an ugly scowl, which he probably thought was intimidating.
“How many horses did they get?”
“Six. I asked you a question, Bartram. Where the hell were you?”
Only six. That meant they still had eighteen horses left. And sixteen men. That was still enough for what Bartram had in mind, but just barely.
“I told you those were centaur tracks we seen yesterday,” Bartram said. “Told you we needed to be careful. What the hell were the lookouts doing?”
“I don’t know,” Flarity said, his jowls jiggling with rage. “I was in my tent when they came roaring through. Lucky I didn’t get trampled to death in my sleep. Now I’m asking you for the third and final time: where the devil have you been?”
Bartram let the question hang in the air. Third and final time my ass, he thought. Did Flarity really think he could scare an alpha with a little tough talk? Yeah right. For a moment, he considered how good it would feel to punch a hole through the bastard’s flabby throat and yank his esophagus out. It wasn’t the first time he’d indulged in such a fantasy.
But, no.
The truth was, Bartram needed Flarity, just as much as Flarity needed him.
Flarity was a businessman, and in some ways that made him even more dangerous than a simple alpha like Bartram. The man had money, connections, resources—and they would need to put all those things to use in order to get at the fortune that lay up in those mountains, a fortune even greater than either of them had imagined.
Bartram dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out a lump of something he’d brought back with him. The stone glittered like gold, and it glowed softly with its own internal luminescence in the predawn darkness.
Instantly, the anger disappeared from Flarity’s face, and his eyes bulged greedily.
“Firestone!” he gasped. “Where’d you find that?”
“Up in them mountains,” Bartram answered. “There’s a shitload more where this came from. And the firestone ain’t even the most valuable thing up there. We need to move quick, though. Duffy and her riders will be finding it soon enough themselves, and I reckon once they see what’s up there, they’ll be in a hurry to get back to Lamentation and blab to everyone about what they found. That could be real bad for our business, Mr. Flarity. Luckily, I got a plan to make sure those shitkickers don’t ever make it back to town.”
Flarity grinned, teeth clamped on the end of his cigar.
“I’m listening, Butch. I’m listening…”
