The Legend of Diablo

Chapter 2-1

“There are still only five men.”

“Count them again.” The bland order chafed every time it was repeated. Hettie knew that, but she’d also learned not to jump into any situation until she was absolutely certain.

“We should go now,” Duke Cox growled. The man had been with her for nearly three years, and he still questioned her orders. “We’ve been sitting on our asses for damn near two hours, and it’s hot as hell out here!”

“Hell’s a lot hotter, and it’s where you’ll end up if we’re not careful,” Hettie said without looking the man’s way. “Count ’em again, Tommy.”

The younger man peered through his spyglass once more. “Five, Mizzay.”

She cut him a narrowed look. Duke cuffed him in the back of the head. “Not Miss A, you lunk. You call her Blackthorn when we’re out here.”

“Sorry, Miss—I mean, Blackthorn.” Tommy lowered his chin. “Won’t happen again.”

She kept her expression cool. “Count ’em out loud, Tommy, so we can be sure.”

“One, two, three…four…five.” He paused. “No, wait, six. Seven! I see more of ’em now!”

His pitch rose with excitement, terror. “Fifteen! No, twenty!”

“Twenty, eh?” Hettie sighed as she conjured Diablo. “Not as many as I’d hoped.” She rolled her neck, and it popped. “Plan’s still the same, though. Five or twenty-five, it don’t make a difference.”

She notched her chin at Tommy. The young sorcerer hastily put his spyglass away, then raised a bright pink conch shell and recited the amplification spell precisely. Hettie’s throat expanded as she put her ear and mouth to the shell. “Walker, d’you hear me?”

“There are twenty-three men, including the drivers.” His voice was like a whisper carried across the sea. He had a similar conch—amplification spells were messy because, when cast, everyone could hear them. Tommy, however, had crafted this pair of linked talismans so that their conversation would be private. He was extremely talented, though too anxious by half. It was a dangerous combination in someone so young.

“Twenty-three. We only had twenty.” She glanced at Tommy again, eyebrow arched. He immediately started recounting.

“They’re using hide spells, Hettie. They’re anticipating trouble. It’s gotta be a trap.”

“It’s always a trap. But we need that canister.” She looked at Tommy, his pale forehead beaded with sweat. He would need a hit of juice soon.

“Time to move.” She nodded at Duke. The man signaled the others to prepare for the assault.

The men got into place. Hettie stood and stretched just as a shadowy bloom of darkness alighted from the twisted tree above them, landing on the rock pile fence they’d been crouched behind.

“Open for business?”

She waved off the raven familiar. “Let me be, Rok. I’m busy.”

“Busy, busy business. That’s the name of the game.” The spirit bird clicked his beak. “How many souls will you reap today? Bringer of blood, bringer of death, of war, of pain and ends, bringer of—hrrk!”

She squeezed the bag of bones in her pocket as if she meant to strangle the bird. “Please shut up, Rok, or I’ll grind your beak down for tea.”

The bird squawked and promptly settled. “No wonder Uncle drank so much,” she grumbled. Why he’d bonded this chattering spirit familiar to her when he’d died was something she still hadn’t figured out. Rok could be useful when he chose to be, but mostly, he was just annoying. “Go to it, bird,” she commanded.

Rok took off in a cloud of black dust. She watched him wing into the white-hot sky and dissipate in a puff of ash.

No one could see Rok except her. Familiars didn’t bond to mundanes, and despite wielding the world’s most powerful mage gun, Hettie was as giftless as they came. Eventually she’d stopped trying to convince anyone the raven existed. Even Walker was skeptical. Instead, she used Rok’s gifts as needed, and the gang had learned to trust her uncanny instincts.

The intensity of the sun dimmed, though the sky was clear and cloudless. The men stirred uneasily beneath the greenish light of a supernatural eclipse.

Hettie took this as her cue. She walked into the open toward the cluster of buildings that made up No Hope—four sun-baked wood structures including a general store, a saloon, a clerk’s office, and a long-shuttered sorcerer’s saloon.

She approached the wagon, keeping an eye on the engine and the men guarding it. As she left the perimeter of the gang’s hide spell, she spotted more Division agents perched on the roofs, waiting at windows, hiding in the shadows. They’d come with shotguns and pistols, knives and talismans. Not a lot of good they’d do against her and Diablo.

One of the men shouted a warning. Heads snapped up, muzzles swung around.

Some of them didn’t wait for the order to fire. They knew the stories. They pulled their triggers before they could even be sure it was her, but those reckless men faltered, and their eager guns jammed. A few bullets peppered the ground around Hettie, kicking up plumes of dust, but she kept walking. A raven’s caw echoed over the field. “Bad luck, bad luck!” it sang in a throaty hiss of laughter audible only to Hettie’s ears. Rok had done his job and cursed those who would harm her.

Hettie signaled her men at the same time she dropped into her time bubble.

She drew her saber, the singing of the blade in the deafening silence making her teeth ache. The sword had come from a Division officer she’d killed almost a year ago—a deviant of a man who’d become well-known for beheading the criminals he pursued, serving as judge, jury, and executioner. She’d given him the honor of Diablo’s fire, neither a quick nor painless death by the end. That’d been the last time she’d used the gun to kill. The last time she’d slaked its blood lust.

The saber was cleaner in many respects. While Diablo never missed, it had a mind of its own and could prolong an agonizing death. It had killed when all she’d wanted to do was maim, drinking down another one of her precious years. Her control over it was not absolute. It sometimes thought it knew better than her, and for that reason, she could not always trust it.

The mage gun had taken its toll, its blood price, with interest. She reckoned that with her brittle, gunmetal gray hair, the dark circles under her eyes, and the sun-weathered lines on her face, she looked at least twenty years older than her actual age of twenty-one.

The truth was worse: she didn’t know exactly how many years she’d added. She’d once asked Walker when he’d lost count of the number of men he’d killed. He hadn’t responded.

She started with the snipers. There were more and more of them with each new attack—as if they thought they were safe perched high above everyone, picking off whoever they could, never having to look their victims in the eye.

Cowards, she thought in disgust, spotting the first man lying on the rooftop. She climbed a ladder to the topmost vantage point and began her grisly work.

The last Walker had seen of Hettie, she’d stepped out of the magic blind and was striding toward the town. At the first volley of fire, she’d vanished, and the distant caw of a raven made his skin prickle.

He always took a second to scan the ground for her crumpled body. Every time they went out and she withdrew into her time bubble, he feared she might rematerialize as a corpse on the doorstep to the swirling hell’s gate.

“Madre,” Lena whispered, crossing herself. Beneath the truthteller, the horse known as Tisiphone shifted restlessly.

“Trust her.” He swallowed back the cold, hard lump that rose in him every time they went on a job. These two words sustained his faith in Hettie, in the knowledge that whatever else it might want, the mage gun his stepfather had created would protect its wielder.

The air bristled as the Division agents realized they had fired at a field of nothing, or perhaps a ghost. Walker knew that feeling well now—the collective intake of breath as their enemies finally grasped exactly who and what they were dealing with.

A blood-curdling scream pierced the air. It was joined by another, and another, until a shrieking chorus echoed around them. Walker spotted the writhing bodies atop the roofs. Hettie was doing her work.

His sorcerer sent up the signal to charge. “Let’s ride!”

Walker’s team spurred their horses into action, leaping through the perimeter of the magic blind. They yipped and hooted, kicking up a lot of dust and circling the town, corralling the Division men within.

On the southern flank, Duke’s group opened fire, raining bullets upon the confused and disoriented soldiers. Caught up trying to reload or unjam their guns, the Division men dove for cover, shouting and seeking orders from their commanders. Walker knew who the officers were on sight: they thrashed on the ground, screaming, blood pooling around their ankles. Their Achilles tendons had been cut.

Hettie appeared above them like a wraith. Her mussed gray hair waved around a sallow mask of blank indifference, the kind of expression Death probably wore as he performed his duties. The captain and his second scrambled to draw their sidearms as the gang closed around them.

Before Walker could even think to shout a warning, Diablo winked into Hettie’s hand. Its matte black surface absorbed the sun’s scalding glare. She pointed the mage gun at the two men on the ground.

“Captain.” Her low deadpan carried, thanks to the amplification spell. Her voice had grown harsh over the past few years, rasping like a snake crawling across shale to shed its skin. “I’d hate to send any more of your men home in caskets, so if you could please tell them to put down their weapons…”

“You’re her.” He glanced up and around, but his triumph quickly dimmed.

“You’re wondering about your snipers.” Hettie dumped an armload of rifles in front of the captain. She hadn’t been carrying them a blink ago. Little pink bloodied nubs rained down along with them, but it was only when a large hand slapped onto the dirt that Walker realized they were fingers.

“That one tried to fight me.” Hettie gestured toward the clerk’s office, grimacing. “If you get him some help now, he may yet live.”

The second-in-command retched. The captain growled, “You…you little w***e—”

Walker took a menacing step toward the man, but he needn’t have. “w***e?” Hettie tilted her chin up in thought. “Is that all you have as an insult, Captain Crenshaw? w***e?” He flinched when she addressed him by name. “I know some fine young women and men in the profession. They’re smarter than you, at any rate. They don’t go gambling away their hard-earned paychecks at the poker tables. What do you suppose your wife, Annabelle, thinks of that?”

Walker frowned. She was putting on a real show today.

The captain pursed his lips. His second-in-command looked equally appalled, though Walker doubted it was the man’s gambling habits that’d shocked him.

“Kade,” Hettie addressed the second, startling him. “Please relay my orders. Captain Crenshaw’s a little tongue-tied at the moment.”

“L-lower your weapons. Lower your weapons!” he shouted to the remaining soldiers.

The men slowly obeyed. Duke’s boys confiscated their guns and lined them up with their hands over their heads. They made them kneel in the dust as they divested them of all their money, weapons, talismans, and boots. There was always a need for boots. Walker and the others kept their muzzles trained on their prisoners.

“What do we got, Lena?” Hettie called over her shoulder.

“One canister, half full.” Lena was in charge of the sorcerers who provided magical protection. “Ammunition, food…ooh, dynamite!”

Hettie nodded. “Load ’em up. And check on Tommy. He’s a little peaked.”

Walker would have words with Tommy later. The young sorcerer had juiced up before they’d left, but he’d expended his power too quickly. The highs didn’t just come from the hit—they came from using the juice, performing magic. He worried the young man was getting hooked.

Hettie paced along the line of prisoners. “Gentlemen,” she addressed the Division men, “if you know anything about my reputation, then you know how this goes. Tell me a useful piece of information, and I let you live. Tell me a lie, and you don’t.”

“H-how are we supposed to know what’s useful?” someone asked tremulously. The man next to him knocked him with his elbow.

The kid was fresh out of the Academy, like so many she’d encountered lately—smooth-faced and gangly, his collar and cuffs too starched and too white. Students were being fast-tracked to serve the Division. Hettie tilted her chin. “Well, it depends. There’re only a few things my boys and me really want. Money, magic…and my sister.” She panned the men. “Now, which of you happens to know where Abigail Alabama is?”

As expected, they were silent. The Division was notorious for keeping its projects secret, even from its own agents. That way, no one person knew all of the Division of Sorcery’s machinations.