Cruel angels past sundow.., p.1
Cruel Angels Past Sundown, page 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Cruel Angels Past Sundown
Copyright © 2023 by Hailey Piper
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Published by Death’s Head Press,
an imprint of Dead Sky Publishing, LLC
Miami Beach, Florida
www.deadskypublishing.com
First U.S. Edition
Cover Art: Justin T. Coons
Edited by: Anna Kubik
Copyedited by: Kristy Baptist
The “Splatter Western” logo designed
by K. Trap Jones
Book Layout: Lori Michelle
www.TheAuthorsAlley.com
ISBN 9781639511280
PRAISE FOR CRUEL ANGELS PAST SUNDOWN
“Piper is a voice to be reckoned with.”
—Gabino Iglesias
“Cruel Angels Past Sundown is a gorgeous, bloody, surreal nightmare with a palpable, pulsing heart. Piper’s innovative prose is tactile and immersive. It binds you to Annette’s soul and the people of Low’s Bend and makes you want to fight for them. By the end, I knew neither the wrath of heaven nor hell had any chance of breaking the bonds of queer love and found family. Long live queer horror in the face of those who would call us blasphemous. Thank you for this battle cry in the darkness. This book is a treasure.”
—Suzan Palumbo, Nebula Finalist
“From its unforgettable opening to its furious, apocalyptic climax, Cruel Angels Past Sundown moves with the implacable dread of a nightmare. But the slashes it leaves in your gut, and the hardpan dust it rubs in the wounds, are all too real.”
—Nat Cassidy, author of Mary: An Awakening of Terror
to Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone with admiration and love
ONE:
Saber
THE WOMAN BEGAN as a hazy pale stalk in the distant prairie with a gleam beside her catching the sunshine, and that was everything Annette Ruthie Klein could make out from beside the grooved wooden fencepost.
She had been approaching Big Pete’s pen when the light-on-metal glint caught her eye. Her brother Henry used to mind the old bull, but he had gone the way of Mother’s sickness, and half the cattle herd had followed. Between Annette and her husband Frank, they had both needed to toughen, open up, and reach some understanding, or else let the ranch collapse around them. Annette did most of the coming and going, and sometimes Frank went with her, rarely by himself.
No visitor had come to the ranch since that last futile stop-in by Dr. Hastings, and they had followed him out with Mother’s body in tow.
No visitor until this woman came staggering in from nowhere.
Annette eyed Big Pete beyond the fencing, a tired black bull with a lazy disposition. He didn’t eye Annette back, only huffed and grazed and swatted flies with his swinging tail. By the time she tore her gaze again to the pale strip on the prairie, the woman had stepped closer and sharpened to a clear shape. No more a stalk against rough brown soil and patches of brush, but alive and human.
In her right hand, she clutched a cavalry saber, its steel blade blinking the last of the daylight. She wore no dress, no hat, not a scrap of clothing on her. She was too fair to have been walking in this sunshine naked—no tanning like Annette, no reddening—as if her saber had deflected every ray of sunshine.
And she was pregnant, skin stretched around a smooth round belly, heavy with child. Her bent posture said she felt the weight.
“Frank?” Annette called, letting go of the fence post. “Something ain’t right.”
What could he do? She wasn’t sure, but he needed to know someone had come to the ranch.
If only Annette had gone to town today. If only she had spent yet another night in a room that wasn’t hers.
The sky swelled red, the sun dipping behind distant western mountains. The naked woman seemed a white slit in a strange cat’s eye, nearer now, nearer, almost to the fence. In moments she would be close enough for Annette to reach out and touch.
A huffing moan quaked through Big Pete’s mountainous bulk, and he retreated from Annette to find surviving patches of brush on the far side of his pen. Wasn’t she supposed to put him somewhere? Pasture, barn, the moon—clear thoughts sweated and mixed together. Her wide straw hat might guard her scalp and skin from the sun, but not her mind.
Or was the trouble this woman, now five steps away? The sight of her was making Annette dizzy. Did she want Annette’s dull blue dress to cover her nakedness, to tear it away and reveal Annette’s leathered skin and taut muscle? Except Annette had to be the stronger of the two. The woman was almost skeletal, her limbs and torso thin except at her belly. Either she was three months along and only showing for her thinness, or she was nine months along and her unborn child had taken to drinking and devouring everything but her skin and bones.
Annette was healthier, fitter, and didn’t need clothes, or food, or home. She should give everything over and let this woman take her place at the ranch.
“The hell’s with her?” a deep voice asked.
Annette hadn’t heard her husband approaching. Frank Klein was a man born grown and aged, his exhaustion an inherited part of his soul. He wore a dark blue shirt, its buttons sewn by Annette’s hand. His black mustache bent in a scowl as he turned from the pregnant woman to Annette.
“You know her?” he asked, his voice curious, ever-patient.
Annette opened her mouth, but her tongue was a flat dead animal behind her teeth.
Frank seemed to notice only now the woman was naked. His cheeks reddened, the most bashful man Annette had ever met, and he glanced away. “Lead her in,” he said. “I’ll fetch one of them blankets.”
He was off toward the ranch house before Annette could ask how she would lead the woman. Her gaze crossed Big Pete again—wandering now—and then the woman stood right behind her. A mane of shaggy black hair haloed a narrow face with pursed lips, a small nose, and eyes leaning the yellow side of brown. They almost seemed to shine with the waning sunlight, the same as her saber.
Was Annette supposed to lead her to the barn? Had that been Big Pete? Her thoughts were melted butter down her spine. She stumbled back from the naked woman, nervous against touching that skin, likely hot as a sunbaked salt flat. The gleaming saber turned sideways, a bright smile over the soil.
“Come,” Annette said, and she stumbled back another step. “Come along, saber girl.” Except this woman was too grown to be a girl. A lady with her weapon, naked or not, deserved better than to be called after with a wave and a high-pitched tone as if Annette were leading reluctant cattle home.
But Saber seemed more animal than human, didn’t she? Naked as a beast, quieter than Big Pete, only staring without end, her head full of wind and instinct.
Still, she knew enough to follow.
The ranch house stood with unpainted wooden walls and a leaning roof with its two chimneys jutting hornlike to either side. Its doorway often hung dark, neither Annette nor Frank bothering to light more than a wispy lantern near dusk anymore.
But tonight candles glowed along the supper table beyond the front doorway and kitchen, and more of them dotted the sitting room shelves to one side. Their small flames danced in Saber’s eyes.
Frank appeared from the sitting room carrying a thick woolen blanket. He passed it to Annette, and she wrapped it around Saber’s shoulders. Her arms dangled at her sides.
“Sit her down,” Frank said, pulling out a wooden chair from the supper table—his chair, at the head. When Saber didn’t move from Annette’s side, he patted the seat with a thick, scarred hand. “Here, miss.”
Saber shuffled toward the seat and collapsed onto it. Annette’s mind boiled, but she pulled the blanket snug around their guest’s front and covered her nakedness. Better than dressing her. That would be like fitting a shirt onto a wolf, but Annette had tossed blankets on the horses, cows, and even Big Pete. Had she left him outside or brought him in? She couldn’t remember. Maybe he would act like Saber must have, shifting shape from beast to human. Any minute, he would wander inside, naked and silent, holding a horn in each hand instead of a sword.
Frank knelt beside Saber’s seat. His bones creaked all the way down, and he had to set a hand on the table’s edge to steady himself. He managed to look into Saber’s amber eyes, her nakedness no longer so obvious.
“Got a name, miss?” he asked, gentle as the blanket.
Saber stared hard at the table as if her name were carved into its planks.
“Where you come from?” Frank shifted uncomfortably. “Someone take your clothes? Who did this to you?”
There was a strange ticking, and Annette hoped it was Saber’s mouth slinging open to speak.
The tick came again, and Annette glanced under the table—the point of Saber’s blade tapped the plank floor, up and down with her slow breath.
“How about that sword?” Frank asked. “Looks like cavalry issue from the war, what, twenty years back? Maybe your husband’s? Or your father’s? You’re too young for it.” He smiled, as if he thought Saber might laugh at his little joke, but she remained sullen.
Annette wanted to chuckle, felt it bubble in her throat, but she didn’t have the strength for humor. Saber’s head turned in stea dy inches, and her yellow gaze shifted across the candlelit room. She seemed to be looking anywhere for answers. Annette had none. She couldn’t have even stood if Frank weren’t here. Without him, the walls might turn to mud and then slop down to the floor, abandoning all shape. Through the windows, sunset purpled the world.
“You hungry? Thirsty?” Frank made to stand. “Powerful heat today, miss.”
Annette’s voice rolled out. “Saber.” The blade no longer gleamed with reflected sunshine, but candlelight kept it smiling even in the dim ranch house. Tick, tick.
Frank glanced at the point as it tapped the floor again. “Wouldn’t part her with it,” he said. “That’d be like pulling out a cat’s claws. She wouldn’t hurt no one with that if she didn’t have to.”
A thin red teardrop traced down his cheek. The color had to be some trick of the light, but when he wiped it with his sleeve, a dark splotch stained his shirt. There was no impatience in the firm line of his mouth. His brown eyes lit with nothing more than an earnest desire to help this poor woman as red tears streaked down his face.
Didn’t his heart hurt to stare into her eyes? His thoughts seemed solid enough to ask questions.
Annette couldn’t say the same. Husband and wife alike usually came stiff and sturdy as fenceposts, standing firm after a storm when everything else had been blown away, no choice in it.
But not tonight. Annette had turned from a fencepost into a puddle of spilled milk, and Frank’s demeanor seemed pillowy. He should have been aggrieved over Saber’s full womb while Annette’s kept empty—or was that Annette’s expectation he might know her guilt?
They were due for a trip into town for some distraction, but distraction had come to them instead.
They supped on dry bread and the remains of an earlier chicken and leek stew. Annette kept dropping her spoon, her hands forgetting how to hold it. She didn’t clean up either, not even to wipe the sticky fluid from her cheeks. Every step sloshed as if the floor teetered. She had never set foot on a ship, but her father had as a boy, he’d once told her when she was a child, shortly before his death. He had said the deck swayed up and down like they were sailing on a giant’s chest. The ranch house did the same tonight.
Saber did not eat or drink. No cracked lips, no sunburn, no dry scaling on her hands. Like Annette and Frank had imagined this woman out of the spring wind, someone to bear children for them when they had none.
Was their absence because of him? Because of her? A mystery, but no matter the reason, Frank could never know her secret relief. He had accepted so much strangeness in her town trips, respected her needs, even joined her, listened to her, understood and bore it all, but to know she had never wanted his children would have hurt his heart, and this good man didn’t deserve the pain.
If Saber brought them children, taking on the role of mother that Annette had never wanted, she would be a blessing more than a phantom. If it made Frank happy, she would welcome it.
Cattle lowed beyond the ranch house walls. Were they out stalking the fences, or did they stand in the barn? Annette didn’t know.
Frank spoke haltingly with a drowsy tone. “Annie. See what’s. Fussing. Them animals. Would you?”
Annette wanted to ask why he was crying blood, or if she was crying as many red tears. The words wouldn’t form. The cattle lowed again, demanding she mind them.
She wobbled to her feet and started for the front door, but her path skewed toward the sitting room’s small square window. The crimson sun scarcely peeked over the western mountains, and every fencepost’s shadow scraped claw-like toward the ranch house. That had to be what was spooking the animals. There were coyotes to consider, and sometimes wolves, but Annette didn’t see them.
Maybe the predators, too, were frightened. She couldn’t say why. The shadows might reach out and terrify every lean predator for a hundred miles.
She was frightened with them, but she couldn’t say why.
The air sagged against the floor as she turned from the window. She dropped to her hands and knees. Wooden planks pressed her fingertips, but they’d turned muddy since she crossed the house. Lit candles glowed with purple-red auras, each a miniature dusk with its own drowsy sun. Red tears clotted Annette’s eyes.
Her dreams had no firm skeletons to keep them standing, only flesh and tissue and bones, a collapsing cavern of innards without rhyme or reason. Nothing held real shape inside this red nightmare, but Annette found Saber’s face and a raw, unnamable taste in her mouth.
The word came to her as she woke up—blood. She must have bitten her tongue when she hit the floor, though no wound stung when she ran its dry pad back and forth under her curious teeth. The taste lingered in her throat, a copper coin tossed into a campfire. She must have swallowed in her sleep, taking dreams, blood, and a mysterious wound down her throat.
The sitting room candles had gone out, leaving the house a black framework bracing moonlit windows. Did a hand brush her collarbone, or was that the wind?
Heat stirred in her chest, some of those melted thoughts pooling in her heart, her lungs, down, down. She couldn’t tell where they ended, her body a bottomless channel along an infinite spine. She didn’t want to tell.
A wet crackle iced her skin. Something shuffled in the darkness. Coyote? Wolf?
Annette pressed against the floor, inhaled the smell of dust, and then listened. She knew the general restlessness surrounding the ranch house. That was prairie life, all insects and wind, and coyote howls you hoped kept distant. Something was always loud and alive in the prairie night.
The crackle came again, a ticking. Saber’s sword? No, too damp, a throat full of trapped air. Annette would have thought she’d swallowed a bubble of blood and made the noise herself, but the sound crossed the ranch house. She couldn’t see what walked there, but she felt it break from one patch of darkness and scrape bare feet across the wooden planks toward the bedroom. Steel tapped the walls.
Annette rolled from flat on her back and onto her hands and knees again. She crept low through the hall, behind the moving darkness. Frank had been too tired and dizzy to notice she had passed out, but he must have made it to bed.
Where Saber found him.
She was a pale figure wreathed in blackness against the moonlight. That heavenly glow filled the bedroom as she approached the bed’s foot, blade in her right hand, her flesh freed from the blanket.
So then, Frank was fond of this woman. Maybe because she showed proof in her very figure that she could give the children that Annette had not and didn’t want to.
That was fine. Her heart trembled and her throat tightened, but she forced herself to swallow that tightness, remember hers and Frank’s understanding, and accept this moment. He should have talked it out with her, but she was drowsy—it was fine. She, too, kept a piece of her heart elsewhere. There were nights he joined her in the boarding rooms above Slim’s Respite in town, but there were nights she kept for herself and Gloria Travers, and Annette couldn’t ask Frank for absolute faithfulness when she wouldn’t do it herself. Besides, the bed offered plenty of room. They each had their needs and love. He must have whispered in Saber’s ear to come find him after dark, while Annette slept on the sitting room floor, his good humor at last breaking through Saber’s shock and silence.
Her round belly slid onto the bedding. Frank might pretend he was the man who’d impregnated her. Would she stay until the birth? Beyond? Would he and Annette help raise whatever slipped out between those white stick legs?
She should have asked, but right now she could hardly sit upright. One hand squeezed the bedroom’s chipped doorframe, but it wouldn’t help her stand. Every muscle tensed through her bowed legs, down her bent back.
Saber had no muscle like this. Her skin was an ash-white suggestion against the world, a dream allowed to walk the wakeful night. She crept onto the bed by hand and knee and saber, up Frank’s legs, between them, to his chest. Her back arched, arms raised. Another wet crackle filled the room as her blade flashed a moonlit grin.
And then it sank into the warmest parts of him, painting dark streaks across its steel tooth.
Annette’s hand let go of the doorframe and dropped over her mouth. A toad-like scream croaked and died in her throat.
“Annie?” Frank wheezed as if Annette could do anything to stop this.
