Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) Page 12

  “What about the girl?”

  “What girl?”

  Zeena laughed wryly. “That’s why I haven’t done anything like this since my husband passed four years ago. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s the way it is for you, isn’t it?”

  “I reckon it is if we haven’t made any promises.” Zeena’s breasts were heavy but firm, her body pale and fine. It wasn’t a taut young body, but a full, mature one with some extra flesh on it that owned its own, earthy allure.

  Longarm hung his cartridge belt and pistol on a bedpost. “You lure me over here for a tongue-lashing?”

  “I lured you over here because you’re damn handsome. Big and manly. Any woman would like to be held by you. I suppose it harkens back to when we were all living in caves and we women were driven to the best of men for safety, and to father the stoutest offspring. I don’t know.”

  Zeena laughed and sat on the edge of the bed naked, wearing only a gold neck chain with a small wolf figurine carved from obsidian dangling from it between her breasts. “Maybe it’s because you’re just passing through and I’ll never see you again after tonight.”

  Her eyes widened as he tossed away his balbriggan bottoms and stood before her naked. “Oh,” she said, huskily, her voice catching a little. She laughed. “Oh, yes, that will do nicely.”

  She dropped to her knees before him and ran her admiring eyes up and down the throbbing length of his cock, caressing it tenderly with her fingertips. Longarm could feel her hot breath on him.

  “Oh, yes,” she breathed. “This will do just fine.”

  She nuzzled his scrotum and then slid her tongue up the underside of his cock so slowly that he thought he was going to grind his toes right through the thick, plush carpet beneath his feet. Desire jetted in him. He squeezed his eyes closed. Her tongue slid up to the end of his cock, and then the heat and wetness of her mouth closed over it and slid slowly, slowly down, taking nearly all of him.

  Longarm heard himself groan.

  When she’d brought him to the edge of the cliff, he stepped back away from her and sucked a long, calming breath. She looked up at him, kneading his taut belly with her hands.

  “I’ll finish you if you want, Longarm.”

  “That’d be right selfish of me, wouldn’t it?” he croaked. “Since you said you haven’t had it in a while.”

  “My,” she said, looking up at him from beneath his hard cock, touching the tip of her tongue teasingly to the end of it. “Maybe I misjudged you.”

  She rose from the floor, turned the bedcovers back, and climbed in. Longarm climbed in after her. She fluffed the pillow and lay her head down on top of it, staring up at him with those beguiling brown eyes that were turned up ever-so-slightly at the corners, giving them a Slavic slant. They were framed by her long, dark brown hair that curled down over her shoulders to caress the sides of her heavy, sloping breasts, the nipples of each tilted to the side and fully distended.

  As he mounted her, he could feel the wetness of her need. She lifted her head and looked down at his cock, spreading her legs, taking his iron-hard dong in both of her hands, and holding it tightly against her snatch.

  He held himself suspended on his arms and the tips of his toes while she closed her eyes and pleasured herself very slowly with the head of his cock, running it up and down the warm, soft entrance to her womanhood. Her breasts rose and fell sharply, and he leaned his head down to lick and nuzzle them, to suck each nipple in turn.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh . . . oh, Christ . . . oh . . . oh . . . !”

  Then she opened her eyes, smiled up at him, showing nearly all of her pearl-white teeth, and slipped his massively swollen head inside her. She wrapped her hands around his ass and drew him into her. He felt his cock, like a warm, sparking nerve, sliding into her—deep down and then up inside her womb, toward her belly, until it wouldn’t go any farther.

  He slid back out, and she sighed.

  He slid back in, and she groaned.

  He tried to slide back out again, but she held him there, and she herself tightened—every inch of her—tipping her head far back on the pillow until the cords stood out in her neck.

  He felt her pussy quivering and oozing as she came, drawing her knees up hard against him. When she opened her eyes, she reached up and placed her hands on the sides of his face, holding his head as he began to hammer against her, smiling at him ethereally until he, too, had taken himself over the edge and felt the hot, relieving burst of release.

  He squeezed his eyes closed and held himself hard against her as the final spasms rippled through him.

  He felt something small and cold press against his chest. Opening his eyes, he looked down to see that she was holding her pearl-gripped pocket pistol against his sternum. She clicked the hammer back. Her brown eyes owned a sad cast as she said, “I’m sorry to have to end such a wonderful night this way, Custis.”

  Chapter 15

  “No need to apologize,” Longarm said, keeping his still-hard cock deep inside her. “I took the bullets out when you were building a fire earlier.”

  Zeena pulled the Remington’s trigger. The hammer dropped with a click. Her mouth opened slightly in shock. “How . . . did . . . ?”

  “While I don’t believe in beatin’ around the bush myself, you just seemed to come on a little too strong for someone I take to be the naturally reserved sort.”

  She frowned angrily and pulled the pistol’s trigger again, again, and again, until the hammer had clicked five more times. Longarm smiled grimly down at her, took the popper out of her hands, and pulled out of her. She threw her head back against the pillow with an enraged grunt.

  Longarm dropped his feet to the floor and glanced over his shoulder at her. “Why?”

  She lay naked on top of the bed, staring at the ceiling in defeat. Still, she summoned some steel into her voice as she said, “Go to hell.”

  “Better tell me or I’ll haul your ass in on federal charges. That’s what attempting to drill a pill through a deputy U.S. marshal’s heart will get you.” Longarm felt his own anger rise, as it did when folks tried to kill him. Especially those who had just fucked him. The two acts did not sit well so close together.

  “Come on. Spill it. Who put you up to this? Goldie’s friends? Calvin? Who?”

  She lifted her head. “Calvin? Why would he want you dead?”

  “Him and Goldie are about the only two folks I know in town, and Calvin’s made no bones about wanting me to get my ass out of here sooner rather than later.”

  Zeena rested her head back against her pillow once more. She sighed at length and turned her mouth corners down as she continued to stare at the ceiling. “No, it wasn’t Calvin. It was the man you shot earlier. It was for him.”

  Longarm scowled, knitting his brows together and carving a plethora of deeply skeptical lines across his forehead. “Kansas Pete Durant?”

  She returned an indignant glare. “I loved him, all right?”

  “You and Pete Durant?”

  “I just told you I loved him, didn’t I?”

  “That stuck way up high in my craw, I’m afraid, Zeena. I just can’t see a straight-backed, good-lookin’ woman like yourself—a woman with her own business, no less—hitchin’ her star to the likes of that worthless bushwhacker!”

  “He wasn’t worthless anymore,” she said, scooting up to sit against the bed’s brass headboard and drawing the quilts and blankets up to cover her breasts. “He’d come up here to hide out about a year ago. He came to work for me, doin’ odd jobs about the place, and . . . well . . . he changed.” She lowered her voice, made it sound sincerely intimate. “We fell in love. When he saw you, he figured you were here to haul him back to Denver. I tried to get him to forget it, but Pete was one hardheaded man. He said he wouldn’t let you take him in. Not alive, anyway. We’d built too much together.”

  Long
arm just stared at her, unable to imagine her and Kansas Pete Durant together. It would be like trying envision a pretty schoolmarm screwing the town drunk. But he had to admit he’d seen it before—two disparate people somehow throwing in together, to the total shock and surprise of everyone who knew them.

  He shook his head as he continued to think it through. Behind him, Zeena sobbed quietly. “He was good and gentle. Of course, you wouldn’t believe it, but he was as good a man as I’d ever known. He was kind to me. Eventually, we were going to run off to Mexico together.”

  Her voice turned hard with acrimony. “And you took him away from me, you bastard! What does that leave me?” She sobbed, sniffed. “It leaves me nearing middle age up here in this wolf-haunted village—alone! Do you know what it’s like for an aging woman alone?”

  Longarm regarded her with less heat as she sat there, arms crossed on her chest, head down, sobbing. He sighed, heaved himself to his feet, and walked over to the washstand. He set the pistol on the stand, poured water from a pitcher into the basin, and began scrubbing his privates.

  “Well, I’ll be damned” was all he said.

  It was the only thing either of them said. When he finished washing, he dressed, hearing the wolf howling from the northern ridge again. He donned his hat, noted a gathering chill in the room, and added a couple of chunks of split cedar to the stove from the wood box, closing the door afterward with a shrill squawk of the iron handle. He glanced at her once more, staring into empty space through a tangle of hair over her eyes. Then he grabbed his rifle, turned to the door, and stepped into the hall.

  He stood there for nearly a minute, staring at the carpet. He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around Zeena and Kansas Pete, but there were some things—especially regarding the relations of some men and some women—that just didn’t figure. Love was one of them. Damn, she had him feeling bad about killing that no-good killer and general hard case Kansas Pete Durant.

  Imagine that.

  As he walked along the narrow hall, hearing only a few hushed voices behind the closed doors on either side of him and smelling liquor and the cloying midnight oil, he checked his old turnip watch. Damn near eleven o’clock.

  One of those apprehensive twinges he’d been getting of late raked across his spine. It was sort of like being anxious about an upcoming appointment. He gave an amused snort, but again he noted a lack of real amusement in the snort; it expressed only his wanting to feel amused.

  He felt genuine trepidation about midnight.

  What did he think? he wondered as he headed on down the stairs, replacing the pocket watch and plucking a cheroot from his shirt pocket. Did he think ole Goldie and the little boy, David Leonard, were going to turn into werewolves and run in a bloody killing frenzy with all the other wolves of Crazy Kate, literally painting the town red?

  He stood out on the Black Wolf’s front porch, looking around carefully to make sure he was alone out there in the chilly darkness, and then he stared up at the moon. It was about a half hour away from its zenith. He could see the little pocks and fissures on the lunar landscape. The sunlight reflecting off it almost seemed to pulsate, white as a giant pearl.

  Again, the wolf on the mountain howled. The call was as long and mournful and menacing as before. The echo took a long time to die. When it did, the howl came again, just like before.

  Longarm felt himself shudder and then stepped off the porch and walked west along the street to the Carpathian, which was still as lit up as it had been several hours earlier. If anything, it was even busier than before, as though everyone was celebrating some religious holiday, though in reality they knew they were all merely trying to distract themselves from the moon rising ever higher above the Carpathian’s shake-shingled roof.

  The general and his hunting party were still there, at the same table as before. The general had gotten his second wind, and one of the pudgy local whores was teaching him how to dance what appeared to be a traditional dance of the Old Country while a good dozen other men sat or stood around, stomping their feet and clapping.

  Longarm wended his way through the crowd. He was tired down deep in his bones, and he only wanted to check on Catherine and find a place to throw down for some sleep. If he could, that was. With the full moon on the rise.

  In the second-floor hall, he stopped in front of her door. He turned the knob, expecting the door to be locked, but to his surprise, the latch clicked. He pushed the door open to find a lamp burning dully on the dresser. Catherine lay curled on her side beneath the covers, hair splayed out across her pillow.

  Longarm closed the door, leaned his rifle against the dresser, walked over to the bed, and sat on the edge of it. He drew the covers down very gently, so as not to wake her, and exposed her right arm. She’d placed a white bandage over it. The bandage was wet—he could smell the whiskey she’d soaked it with—and slightly blood-spotted. Nothing too severe, though the beast had certainly drawn blood. But she’d live.

  As long as she didn’t turn into a werewolf in a half hour.

  She gasped and snapped her eyes open with a start. “Oh!” she said, settling her head back onto the pillow and smiling. “It’s you. Where’ve you been, Custis?”

  “Uh . . . followin’ up on a hunch.”

  “About the man who tried to shoot you?”

  “Yeah. How you feelin’?”

  “Just fine. I swilled whiskey to kill the pain.” Catherine flung the covers back groggily, revealing her long, bare legs beneath a chemise so thin he could see everything under it. “Get undressed and crawl in here, you.”

  For the first time in his life, Longarm’s dong actually sagged down between his thighs at the thought of another mattress dance. That would be how many tussels in one day? He’d lost count.

  “I figured I’d go out and keep an eye on things,” he lied, intending to hole up for a couple of hours in the livery barn with his horse, where he could probably get a lot more rest than he could here. Even if she didn’t want to rassle again, sleeping beside a beautiful woman could be enervating as opposed to restful.

  “I won’t hear of it,” she said. “Even a federal lawman needs his sleep. Get those duds off that big, brawny carcass of yours, and crawl in here and keep me warm.”

  So that’s what he did. It turned out she even let him sleep, as she slept herself with the help of the whiskey. Only, he wasn’t sure how much time had passed before she rose from the covers, flung her chemise aside, and rolled on top of him, sitting up and tenting the bedcovers with her body.

  She placed his hands on her breasts and threw her head back, flinging her thick hair behind her shoulders. While he kneaded her lovely bosoms, she rubbed her silky snatch around on his cock. He didn’t think he had any more lead in the old pistol, but he’d be damned if, after a few minutes of her moist snatch manipulating him, he didn’t look down and see that raging hard-on standing at full mast in front of her belly.

  She scuttled down his legs a ways, lowered her head, and licked him until he was even harder. She dropped her mouth down over his cock’s head, and then she dropped it still farther along the shaft, until he felt her throat pressed up hard against him and heard the liquid sounds of her sucking, the sultry, beguiling sounds of her groaning in pleasure.

  When she lifted her head, it was no longer Catherine’s head but a wolf’s head nearly as large as a cow’s. The yellow eyes glowed in the midnight-black sockets. Somehow, they remained Catherine’s eyes, only instead of hazel they were yellow. The beasts’s hackles rose, shrouding the head in spiky fur, and the upper lips lifted to reveal two-inch-long, ivory-white, razor-edged fangs.

  Catherine threw her wolf’s head far back on her shoulders, loosed a long, shrill howl, then pointed her long, thick nose toward Longarm once more, growling and snarling savagely.

  Longarm loosed a howl of his own as she thrust her teeth toward his throat.

  Chapter 16r />
  “Custis!” the wolf screamed.

  Longarm stared at the wolf’s eyes. They were hazel now. And the wolf’s head around them was suddenly Catherine Fortescue’s head.

  Her very beautiful, human head.

  She was staring at him, her eyes bright with terror, sort of leaning back away from him. Longarm realized then why she was the one looking fearful now, for he was staring over the cocked hammer of his .44, which was aimed at the girl’s beautiful, human—yes, human—head.

  He lowered his eyes past her gold necklace to the red-plaid wool shirt she wore beneath her open fur coat. Her mussed, honey-blond hair glistened in the glow of the lamp that had been turned up on the dresser.

  His heart hammering painfully against his breastbone, Longarm looked around for the wolf. No sign of it.

  “Custis,” she said, loosing a long, relieved breath as he lowered the Colt, “you were dreaming, honey. Just dreaming.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “What . . . were you dreaming?” she asked, the color beginning to return to her cheeks.

  Slow to shake the nightmare, still half-believing she was about to tear out his throat, he looked at her arm clad in fur and wool. “How’s your arm?”

  “Hurts a little,” she said, staring at him skeptically. “But it’s better.” She leaned forward and placed a desperate hand on his shoulder. “Custis, you have to help me. My father . . . his men . . . they’ve gone out hunting.”

  He sat up in bed, looking around. The window was dark; it was still night. How long had he been sleeping? “What time is it?”

  “Half past midnight.”

  He swung his feet to the floor, sitting up, blinking groggily, still trying to clear the cobwebs and the image of the yellow-eyed black wolf from his retinas. He looked at her, her words just then penetrating the thick skin of his consciousness. “Did you say . . . ?”