“The saloon the mayor passed a law against?”
“Well, it ain’t like it’s a state law,” Earp said. “More of a misunderstandin’. See, as much as the good folks north of the tracks don’t want to admit it, cattle and these cowboys are what keeps this town alive. And those boys don’t want to come in at the end of a three-month trail ride and have a nice bath and a cup of tea. Kind of country they’re going through can be a little tough. So they drop their money here, blowing off steam.” He rubbed at his mustache. “Hell, sin is the currency around this place. Don’t take a genius to see that. Those good folk are going to righteous themselves right out of a home.” He sighed. “Dammit, Doc. Why ain’t you here yet?”
“Friend of yours?” I asked.
“Holliday,” Earp confirmed. “Good fella to have with you when it’s rough. Plus he’s got two of them Venator pendants around his neck. Took one from some fool in a faro game.”
“I need to know,” I said, “if you mean to take the Thule Society’s offer seriously.”
“Can’t do that, Miss Anastasia,” Earp said. “They’re only offering me something I can get for myself just as well.”
I found myself smiling at that. “You’re willing to challenge an entire town to a fight? For the sake of your friend’s saloon?”
“It ain’t the saloon, ma’am,” Earp drawled. “It’s the principle of the thing. Man can’t let himself get run out of town by a mob, or pretty soon everyone will be doing it.”
“If a mob is responsible,” I said, smiling, “is not something close to everyone already doing it?”
Earp’s eyes wrinkled at that, and he tapped the brim of his cap.
“Idiot,” said the German from the cell, contempt in his voice.
“Sometimes,” Earp allowed. He shut the peephole and said, “Those Thule bastards ain’t going to wait half an hour. Snakes like that will come early.”
“I agree,” I said. “But going out shooting seems an unlikely plan.”
“Can’t disagree,” Earp said. “Course, maybe it’s just a man’s pride talkin’, but it seems like it ain’t much of an idea for them to try to come in here, either.”
It was then that the drum began beating, a slow, steady cadence in the darkness.
I felt my breath catch.
The German smiled.
Earp looked at me sharply and asked, “What’s that mean?”
“Trouble,” I said. I shot a hard glance at the German. “We’ve made a mistake.”
The German’s smile widened. His eyes closed beatifically.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
He said nothing.
“What the hell is going on?” Earp said, not in an unpleasant tone.
“This man is no mere member of the Thule Society,” I said. I turned my attention toward the outside of the jailhouse, where I could already feel dark, cold, slithering energy beginning to gather. “We are dealing with necromancers. They’re calling out the dead. Is there a cemetery nearby?”
“Yep,” Earp said. “Boot Hill.”
“Deputy,” I said. “We need to plan.”
“SHOOT,” EARP SAID a quarter of an hour later, staring out the peephole. “I didn’t much like these fellas the first time I shot them.” He had added another revolver to his belt, and had traded in his shotgun for a repeating rifle. “And time ain’t been kind. I make it over thirty.”
I stepped up next to Earp and stood on my tiptoes to peer out the peephole. We had dimmed the lights to almost nothing, and there was just enough moon to let me see grim, silent figures limping and shambling down the street toward the jailhouse. They were corpses, mostly gone to bone and gruesome scraps of leathery skin with occasional patches of stringy, brittle hair.
“There’s some more, coming up on that side,” Earp said. “Forty. Maybe forty-five.”
“Properly used, a dozen would be enough to kill us both,” I said to him. I took a brief chance and opened my third eye, examining the flow of energies around the oncoming horrors. “We are fortunate. These are not fully realized undead. Whoever called them up is not yet an adept at doing so. These things are scarcely more than constructs—merely deadly and mostly invulnerable.”
He eyed me obliquely. “Miss Anastasia, that ain’t what a reasonable man would call comfortin’.”
I felt my lips compress into a smile. “After a certain point, the numbers hardly matter. The drum beats for their hearts—it both controls the constructs and animates them. Stop that and we stop them all, even if there were a thousand.”
“And until then?”
“Until then, aim for the head. That should disrupt the spell controlling them.”
Earp looked over his shoulder at the German. The man looked considerably less smug or comfortable than he had throughout the evening. At my direction, Earp had hog-tied him to one of the wooden pillars supporting the roof and gagged him thoroughly. I had chalked a circle of power around him and infused it with enough energy to prevent him from reaching outside of it for any magical power. They were crude precautions, but we could not afford to give the German an opportunity to strike at us while we were distracted. Such measures would hinder any particularly dangerous attack—and would not stop Earp’s bullet from finding the German’s skull, should he attempt anything that was not instantly lethal.
I stepped back from the window, closed my eyes, and invoked the communication spell I had established with the n?cken.
Karl, I murmured with my thoughts, are you ready?
Obviously, the n?cken replied.
Have you located the Thule Society?
There was an amused tint to the dark faerie’s reply. On the roof of a building three doors down and across the street. They seem to think that they have warded themselves from sight.
Excellent, I replied. Then we will begin shortly.
Four warlocks, Karl mused. You realize that your death releases me from our contract?
I ground my teeth without replying. Then I cocked my revolver, turned to Earp, and nodded.
“Seems like a bad hand, Miss Anastasia,” Earp said. “But let’s play it out.”
And with no more fanfare than that, Wyatt Earp calmly opened the door to the jailhouse, raised his rifle to his shoulder, and walked out shooting, and I went out behind him.
Earp was a professional. He did not shoot rapidly. He lined the rifle’s sights upon the nearest shambling figure and dropped a heavy round through its skull. Before the corpse’s knees began to buckle, he had ejected the shell and taken aim at the next nearest. That shot bellowed out, and as the sound of it faded, the crowd of corpses let out a terrifying wave of dry, dusty howls and began launching themselves forward in a frenzied lurch.
I raised my Webley, took aim, and dropped a corpse of my own—though in the time it took me to do it, Earp had felled three more without ever seeming to rush.
“Karl!” I screamed.
There was a thunder of hooves striking the earthen street and the enormous white horse appeared like a specter out of the night. The n?cken simply ran down half a dozen corpses, shouldered two more out of the way, and kicked another in the chest with such force that it flew backward across the street and exploded into a cloud of spinning, shattered bone.
I swung up onto the n?cken’s back, as summer lightning flickered and showed me the dead moving forward like an inevitable tide. Two more of the things reached for me, bony fingers clawing. I kicked one away and shot the other through the skull with the Webley, and then Karl surged forward.
I cast a glance back over one shoulder to see Earp grip the emptied rifle’s barrel and smash a corpse’s skull with the stock. That bought him enough time to back toward the jailhouse door, drawing a revolver into each hand. Shots began to ring out in steady, metronomic time.
“To the roof!” I snarled to the n?cken.