“Your place is here, in the town. People depend on you.”
“I know this.”
“The calientes are men of action. They could not remain here.”
“I know this too. I know all of this, Father.”
“But?”
“It shames me to confess.”
“Go on.”
“At night, when I lie in bed, with no tasks to occupy my mind, I miss the vaquero’s lips on mine, his hands on my body. And when I imagine him with some other woman, a whore perhaps by this time, I am consumed with such a jealous fury I hate myself for feeling so wretched and harboring such ugliness. It is wrong. I had never been this way before I met los tres pistolas.”
“The Guns of Santa Sangre are men of honor, Pilar. They fulfilled their promise. And they took no payment for their deeds because the silver was gone. You must not hate them.”
“Then why do I hurt so much?”
“Because they are your friends.”
“Yes. And I miss them.”
Pilar blinked against the bright sunshine as she stepped out of the makeshift confessional built on the site of the half-rebuilt church on the hill above the village of Santa Thomas. Her people had wasted no time restoring the mission brick by brick and were well underway with the reconstruction of the church and steeple. Already, the spired structure looked humbly majestic atop the hill lording over the huts of the village below. Some men were climbing ladders and whitewashing the adobe façade in front. On the other side villagers carried wood through the great oaken doors to replace pews and transepts of the nave that had been torched in the gunfighters’ showdown with the wolfmen. There was much work still to do. Soon the town people would be able to worship there again.
It had been a month since the battle at the church.
For the first time in her life, Pilar no longer feared the full moon that would come tonight, for a full moon had risen last night, bringing nothing with it but the stars in the sky.
Pilar had been born and raised in the village that now a month later still bore the scars of the werewolves who had enslaved the town and scourged the people. She was just twenty, statuesque and voluptuous beneath her canvas peasant dress, her womanly body firm from manual labor. Pilar was very beautiful and glowed with vitality. Long lush raven-black hair flowed down her broad shoulders and framed her strong and angelic rural Mexican features. People in the village had often said that Pilar resembled the Madonna in the old paintings. Her soulful eyes were a deep and warm brown but the hardness in them was new, for though it had been just a month since the three American gunfighters had ridden off, Pilar had aged years in the shootists’ absence. Four weeks ago, she had been a naive, stout-hearted young village girl when she boldly left her besieged village and with youthful nerve and resolve disguised herself as a boy to hire three gunslingers of the breed she grew up reading about and idolizing in western dime novels. But while the bad men ultimately rewarded her faith and pluck by annihilating the werewolves, in the end she was disillusioned and stripped of her girlish romantic notions for one simple reason ... They left. In their departure, they had taken her innocence with them and that could never be returned.
She brushed a tine of hair out of her eyes blown by the fragrant dusty morning breeze, heart swelling with pride at the busting village life happening all around her—the farmers with the plows, the children with their mothers, the horses and chickens and pigs passing by. She had never thought or dared to hope that things would return to normal for her people in their town after The Men Who Walk Like Wolves had besieged their village in a bloody reign of terror a month before. Already the horror felt like years ago.
Life was back to normal so why did she experience such discontent, Pilar wondered? The answer came quickly to her: the young woman chafed within the confines of her village now, bored with the day-to-day routine in a way she had never been before everything happened, back when she had imagined growing old and dying in Santa Thomas. The village had not changed, she had. It was the fighting, the bullets, the blood, the romance—the thrall she had experienced fighting side by side with the gunslingers vanquishing the monsters—that had changed her. The action was in her blood now. Pilar missed the sting of combat, the tang of gunpowder in her nostrils, the racing of her heart, the pumping of adrenaline in battle. Most of all, she missed Tucker’s hot kisses and the heft of him inside her that one passionate day.
Her little village bored her now. It seemed smaller, constricting, closing in on her more with each passing day. Her blood felt like it was drying up, turning to powder in her veins. And her gaze constantly swept now to the vast desert beyond the town borders, the great big world beyond. Once adventure was in your blood, it stayed there, it seemed. This very morning when Pilar woke, she could not imagine spending another day in her beloved village she had risked her neck for, let alone the rest of her life.
But her friends were gone.
And she was here.
Worst, the man she loved was not at her side. She missed Tucker terribly, a constant ache in her heart. Pilar prayed he would return but knew he never would.
Make the best of it, Pilar.
Forget about them.
Until today, when Pedro rode into town shouting about the werewolves he had seen, she almost had.
Pilar heard the galloping hooves and swung her head to see the fast-approaching rider charging out of the desert into the village—it was Pedro. The boy hurtled down off the ridge in a cloud of dust and rode hard through the streets into the center of town, scattering villagers as he reined his horse by the fountain in the town square. Farmers who had been knocked aside shouted at the agitated youth who urgently jumped out of the saddle, too upset to bother tethering his horse. The animal wasted no time abandoning him for a watering troth where it began to drink. Pedro looked very pale and shaken from up where Pilar stood on the hill. Out of earshot from her, the boy was babbling and gesticulating with his hands to the nearby villagers beginning to gather around him. The faces of the people became alarmed as they listened. Some women put their hands to their mouths.
Watching at a distance, Pilar felt a hard little knot of fear tightening itself in her stomach. What could Pedro be saying that alarms them so? Figuring she better find out, the young woman hurried down the hill of the church into the square, joining the growing crowd surrounding the young farm boy. There, she caught snatches of what he was saying. Soon Pilar had heard enough. In slow disbelief, she pushed through the crowd, shoving people aside shouldering her way through them to stand face to face with Pedro. The boy looked up at her with mortal terror in his gaze.
Only one thing on earth brought that particular look of fear to her peoples’ eyes, Pilar knew with dark certainty.
“Apártate, Pedro,” Pilar hushed. “Get ahold of yourself.” Her voice was firm but quiet for she never needed to raise it. Since recruiting the gallant shootists who saved their town and taking up arms beside them, Pilar was the unspoken leader of her people, her authority recognized by all. “Cálmate y dime exactamente lo que viste”: “Calm yourself and tell me exactly what you saw.”
Doffing his hat, the lad’s scruffy face and hair were covered with sweat, his eyes liquid with fear.
“Han regresado,” was all he said. “They are back.”
Gasps and choked whispers rose from the crowd behind Pilar but her gaze remained locked on Pedro as she stood with him amid the circle of villagers. It took a conscious effort to keep the fear out of her voice as she asked: “More werewolves?”