If he could get there in time, he might even be able to spend the day in a bed instead of a dank mineshaft. There was a whole town nearby.Ĭentral City. The collected smell of horses and livestock kept in corrals. More than blood, he smelled the smoke of wood and coal fires, masonry and painted wood. He found prey, a concentration of warm human blood rising. Felt eddies in the air, sensed creatures that had passed this way, and knew what might be waiting for him over the next hill. Maybe not much more than miners’ cabins and a general store, but they’d do.įinding high ground, he paused and took a deep breath, tasting every scent that came to him. The fall had turned him around a bit, but if he remembered right there were plenty of small towns between here and Denver. Around here, plenty of mine shafts were dug into the rock, out of the light, if he could find one. He could always find someplace out of the sun if he just took a moment and looked. He’d lasted this long and been caught in more unlikely situations than this. He was in the middle of forest, miles from the next town with no sign of shelter anywhere.
The sky was turning gray, dawn was close, and he desperately needed a place to bed down for the day. He gathered what gear he could carry, saddlebags and blankets, left her to the scavengers and moved on. Just that he had a braided band made up of tail hairs from all the horses he’d cared about over the centuries. Coiled up a couple strands of hair from her tail because he wasn’t sure why. He lay next to her for a time, taking in her last warmth and working to remember her, because she deserved to be remembered.
Once he was upright, he’d done the only kind thing he could and ended it for her with his. The whole time, he’d listened to Bandita groan in pain, working herself into a sweat as she struggled to stand and fell back again, her broken legs unable to support her.
Half an hour of lying still and staring at treetops healed him well enough. His own neck had snapped in the fall, twisting wrong when Bandita came down on top of him. Traveling on horseback through the Rockies at night, accidents happened. He and his pretty tamed Mustang mare, Bandita, had been back and forth across the west for six years, and now she’d taken a bad step-a hole, a sharp rock, he hadn’t been able to figure out which-fallen down a hillside, and broken not one but two legs. And yet, Ricardo was immensely sad that his was gone. Horses were the most unreliable, most unfortunate creatures ever to walk the Earth.
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