A Bullet for Betrayal (Preview)


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Chapter One

Colt peered through a flap in the battered canvas as the wagon rattled down the trail. Pa had purchased the wagon just a fortnight ago, but they were well on their way to a new place. One that Pa had said would bring them fortune, a place better than Tennessee had ever been to them or their kin.

The tip of his gun pushed the canvas aside. His uncles weren’t paying him any mind; they had the team ahead of them to worry about. A sneer curled Colt’s lip. The men behind them weren’t his uncles after all, they were cattle rustlers. Bad men. The kind that were brought in and hung for their crimes.

With all the dust from the road, those men would never see Colt in his hiding spot. He had the perfect vantage point. That was what they called it when they found a place to shoot the bad men from: a vantage point.

“Blam blam!” Colt hollered, pulling the trigger of his toy gun. A splinter on the wooden barrel jammed itself into his knuckle.

He wrenched the gun back through the flap and slung it down, pulling the splinter out of his finger and watched as a bead of red welled up on his skin.

A man didn’t cry about gettin’ stuck. Colt, all of ten years old, was a man. As strong as he was proud, he’d get that splinter out all by himself. Ma would be so proud of him when they stopped to camp for the night; he’d tell her the whole ordeal, all the bloody details. 

“I’m not scared of gettin’ hurt,” he told no one in particular. The wagon bed was empty except for himself and the family’s belongings.

As if someone had heard him after all, the wagon snapped to a stop. Ma, riding up on the seat with Pa, murmured something. Was she about to come back and check on him? Colt puffed out his chest. She’d see he wasn’t a baby that needed fixin’ up and she’d be proud.

The first gunshot tore through the canvas not a foot away from Colt’s head. He stared at the hole, mouth going slack. Had someone… misfired…? It happened now and again.

A second shot fired. Behind the wagon, someone screamed. He thought it might be Uncle Robert, but he wasn’t sure. Colt hunkered down in the bed of the wagon, wide-eyed as he peeled the flap back once again. The team snorted and pawed, but they weren’t about to take off with no one guiding them.

Uncle Robert laid flat on the ground, crimson seeping into the blue shirt he wore.

Colt’s heart beat too loud and too fast in his ears. Gunfire roared to life as he pressed himself against the wood, tears forming at the corners of his eyes. A man didn’t cry. A man didn’t scream.

Colt wanted to do both.

More gunfire joined the first, though it seemed as if the shots were coming from behind him. Maybe somebody from the second wagon was alive, returning fire for all they were worth. He didn’t dare peek out to check.

Ma let out a blood-curdling scream that made Colt’s head shoot up. No one was on the front seat any longer. Whether that was because his whole family was dead and gone or because they were out there givin’ the outlaws hell, he couldn’t know. 

Pa had promised he’d get him his own gun once they’d built a homestead. All the money had gone to the wagon and the supplies they needed to survive the trail. There hadn’t been anything left for a boy and his dreams.

“Colt, you come here now,” Ma whispered, appearing at the back of the wagon and forcing the flaps open. “We gotta leave in a hurry.”

Her face was gray, coated with the dirt and grime of the road but pale underneath. She held her hand to a side as blood trickled through her fingers, staining the peach dress from rib to knee. Colt reached out to her hoping she didn’t see the tear tracks he felt on his face. She needed to be proud of him.

Colt grasped her outstretched hand. She smiled at him for a second before his face was spattered with something hot, something sticky.

Ma’s beautiful face was halfway missing. Her fingers fell out of his as she collapsed to the ground, legs twitching in the throes of death he recognized from the animals he’d seen butchered. He reached up to touch his cheek and pulled his hand back to see blood. So much blood.

All he could do was mouth her name and sink into the bottom of the wagon bed again. More holes tore through the wagon, but Colt couldn’t hear them. He slapped his hands over his ears, closed his eyes, and trembled like a dog who’d gone and stolen supper. Ma was dead. Colt knew he would be too, soon.

The fighting took forever. The wagon opened again, for all it didn’t need to. The cloth looked like someone had chopped it up with a knife. Colt lifted his head and watched as a potato bag appeared in front of him, one that swooped around first one way then another.

“Pa?” Colt whispered, a tremor in his voice. “Is that you?”

With a vicious wrench of his hand, the man removed the sack and looked down at Colt. “Never had anyone call me Pa before. Sit still. This’ll only take a minute.”

Always taught to mind his elders, Colt flattened himself against the wagon once more. The man’s long, dark hair was greasy and matted in the back where the bag had stuck to his skin. Covered in sweat, he smelled worse than he looked and he looked awful.

The robber rustled through their belongings and came away with a small bag, all that was left from selling most of their home back east. Colt knew it wasn’t much, but it must have been worth saving if Pa had thought to stick it under the clothes and hide it.

“That’s ours,” Colt breathed and started to get up.

A filthy boot landed on his back and forced him down. “Told you to stay down, boy.”

Colt heard the click of a hammer pulled back and sobbed. If anybody was still out there, they’d help him. They wouldn’t let him die alone.

The man leaned down next to him. Colt saw the barrel of the gun out of the corner of his eye and couldn’t breathe. The thief’s grin was as terrible as he was, a rotten, gap-toothed thing. Colt could’ve sworn he saw a worm loop from one tooth to another.

“When a man tells you to stay down, boy, you do it. Don’t let us see you up again. You hear me?”

The gun withdrew. The man slung the potato bag over his face once more and jumped out of the wagon. Colt listened as the man’s spurs clattered away in the distance.

All he could do was wait. Wait, and hope somebody found him before it was too late.

Chapter Two

The shade of the canopy did little to protect Colt from the sun’s harsh glare.

Mostly that was due to the bullet holes in it.

It seemed that no matter how long he waited, that mean old sun wasn’t going to get any less bright or any less hot. Colt sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, staring at the bloodstained wagon flap that hid him from the rest of the world. Eventually, he knew he’d have to open it. No one else was going to ramble down this old path, one his Pa had picked because it seemed like there’d be fewer travelers along it. That was what Pa had said last night.

Pa’s last night.

No one stirred outside the wagon. Not one damn noise except for the wind that fluttered now and then. In his heart, Colt knew what that meant. If someone was hurt outside, they’d have been beggin’ for help. Help that wouldn’t come, but they’d have begged anyhow.

He didn’t know how many hours had passed, only that several had. Colt stood up in the wagon bed and tried to ignored the dark dots stuck to his skin. Even if Ma couldn’t come with him, he’d have her along whether he wanted to or not.

Colt closed his eyes, opened the wagon, and jumped down. The whole area stank of blood and gunpowder, a reek that made his stomach roll. He put his hands out and walked forward, trying to see without having to look at what those murderers had done to his family.

That was until his foot caught against something soft and still ever so slightly damp.

Biting his lower lip with crooked upper teeth, Colt opened his eyes. Uncle Marley looked up at him, a fly landing on the man’s face. His uncle would never swat a fly away again, Colt noted, from the gaping hole a buzzard had torn in him.

Next to Uncle Marley were a pair of vultures, heads covered with gore. They made quick work of his cousin Rebecca, all of 15 years old. Her skirts were ripped, a tattered mess that covered her enough to be decent but not enough to stop the birds from tearing at her dead flesh.

Ma laid dead outside of the back of his wagon. Pa? He didn’t see Pa, couldn’t guess where his father had fallen. Slowly but surely, Colt crept past the dead and counted every family member he’d ever known.

He was alone. Alone, out in the middle of nowhere, was bad.

It was best that he started walking, he told himself. If he started walking, he’d find someone who wanted to help him. Eventually.

Vultures circled the wagons overhead, swooping down in ones and twos to tear another chunk of his family away. He knew he should be more upset, but everything in him just felt cold. Like the first frost on the ground. It was horrible to see, horrible to look at, but once he got going he wouldn’t see it anymore.

But where? He didn’t know where the nearest town was, or even a settler. Most ladies that had a son or two would take him in for the night, keep him safe. He believed that. No, he knew that.

“I guess… it don’t matter no more,” he muttered to himself, surely not to anyone else.

They weren’t there anymore.

He picked a direction he was pretty sure was north and started off, hat on his head, head bent to shield his face from the sun. Tears fell unchecked, hardly felt. They rolled down his cheeks, off his chin, and were swallowed up by the burning wasteland around him.

No matter how far he walked, the land stretched on forever. A hare or a lizard might run along in front of him for a patch, a bird would fly past him overhead, but nothing happened. He didn’t run across an abandoned homestead, he didn’t find a new Ma willing to welcome him with open arms. He didn’t find water or, as his belly growled, anything to eat. The thief had taken the food as well as the money.

Was he meant to starve or thirst to death out here in the middle of nothing?

Fear crept in under the cold, dragging him into a stupor as he walked. It didn’t matter none how far he was going to go, he’d be just as dead. Ripped and torn apart by the buzzards just like Ma, Pa, Uncle Robert, Cousin Alice…

Night fell, but Colt kept walking. The stones along the ground dug into his feet, some threatening to cut him open. Despite the dark, he wandered. Doom had set its sights on him, but he wasn’t going to give in so easily. The dark wore on and on as his head lolled against his chest, falling asleep even as he stepped.

A tree not much taller than him jutted out of the ground. It was a small, scraggly thing; still like him. And he nearly walked right into it.

“Oh,” he said, blinking away the sleep from his eyes. He dug his fist into temple and sat down. Trees were good, weren’t they? They gave you… shelter… shade…

A hand shook his shoulder. Ma was waking him up to go feed the chickens, but his feet hurt so bad he didn’t want to. The chickens would wait until later; they didn’t mind none. He groaned and turned over, hoping it was enough to get her to stop.

“Boy, what the hell are you doin’ out here by yourself?”

That brought him quickly to the waking world. Colt’s eyes popped open. He jerked back from the stranger, a tall man with dark hair and a face like a saddle. His heart hammered in his head, bringing on a headache the likes of which he’d never had in his entire life. He didn’t see any sign of a potato sack, but that didn’t mean this man wasn’t also someone about to hurt him.

“Don’t you have a family somewhere, youngin’?”

His throat tightened. He looked up at the man, whose expression was too kind to be confused with the murderers he’d seen yesterday. The man’s hand still rested on his shoulder, warming him through. As Colt’s chin trembled, he shook his head. “N-no, sir. I don’t got nobody anymore.”

“Anymore?”

Colt swallowed as the tears started up again, rolling in waves down his cheeks. He rubbed at them with his fist, but that didn’t seem to do any good. They just kept going. “Some bad people killed my family yesterday. Back that way.” He pointed in the direction he thought he’d come.

“Three wagons?” the man’s voice was gentle. “Fifteen miles back or so?”

He had no idea how far he’d walked. He shook his head, nodded, and coughed as his nose clotted up with snot and he tried to breathe through it. “I don’t know, mister. I’m sorry.” Colt gasped, the cold in his chest melting away the red, raw hurt. “I don’t know. I d-d—“

“Is he gonna be okay, Pa?”

The voice was as young as his own. A boy with dark brown hair, messy from bein’ stuck under a hat all day, urged his horse up. It was a tall, gray, leggy animal that looked like she’d go all day long. A brown horse in similar tack stood near the gray, no one in its saddle. Colt assumed it was the kind man’s horse. He looked up at the boy, just a smidgen older than him, and nodded. “I’m… I’m gonna be okay.”

“You sure? It don’t do to sit and cry about it after it’s happened,” the boy said. “You gotta get up and wipe yourself off.”

The man sighed. “Be gentle with him, Uriah. It’s a hard thing to lose your family.”

Uriah, the boy, settled his hat back on his head. “Wouldn’t know, Pa. I’m not gonna ever lose you.”

Pa or not, Uriah’s father shot him a sharp look. Uriah looked away, abashed. When he turned back, he offered his hand to Colt. “Uriah Hale. Sorry about your folks.”

“C…Colt. …Colt Granger,” Colt said, taking the hand and hauling himself off the ground. “Thank you.”

The boys held their grip for a moment longer before releasing it. Uriah looked up at his father. “Pa, he can ride double with me.”

“See to it he does. And that he stays a’horse. We got a long way before we can get him looked at,” Uriah’s Pa ordered, mounting up.

The boys followed to do the same.

Chapter Three

Eighteen Years Later

Colt Granger lay on his stomach atop a grassy knoll as he peered at the abandoned road just below it. His long jacket did its best to keep the sun off of him, but even after all these years he sometimes remembered those long hours in the wagon. The sun roasting him alive. The birds picking at his family—

“Thought this man was slippery quick,” Uriah grumbled as he peeked up over the edge of the hill. “Thought he’d already be here.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Colt’s mouth. “Hold your horses. He’ll get back to camp soon enough and when night falls, he’s ours.”

“Nightfall, when they have a guard posted and waitin’ for someone like us to bring ol’ Harold Moss? That’s the best idea you’ve had.”

The sarcasm wasn’t lost on Colt. “Hard to hide in the sun when there’s damn little cover—ah, shit!”

A fire ant sank its teeth into his leg. Colt gritted his teeth and twisted around on his belly, ripped off his boot, and shook it out. Without noticing it, he’d shoved his foot right into a nest of the little bastards and all of them were pure livid at him for disturbin’ their precious hill home.

Colt elbowed Uriah. “Move over before they tear me up more.”

“Should just keep you there, all the good you’re going to do me later. You’d think after twenty years runnin’ around with Pa and me-“

The ants clearly realized a second human being might have been responsible for their discomfort. Half of the mound swarmed after Colt, the other half after Uriah.

Madder than a wet hen, Uriah shoved himself up from the thin, tall grass and tore his clothes, ants flying everywhere as he did. Colt could only follow suit, the two grown bounty hunters running away from a hill of ants and, Colt was sure, giving away their position. All it’d take was one man catching them dancing around to ruin their chances of catching Moss.

The man was a murderer, having killed a mayor in North Texas for nothing but a few dollars and a night with his wife. Deep down, Colt wasn’t sure if two dead men made things right, but it never seemed to hurt much, either. People wanted an eye for an eye and he was awful good at giving it to them.

“There’s a pond up there,” Uriah hissed, pointing.

The two of them ducked low in the shadows of a half-dozen trees, running for the pond and throwing themselves in it. Colt plunged in, disappearing under the water. Uriah’s feet came down on top of him, kicking, and held him under. Colt pounded on his friend’s leg, ants floating off of it as he did.

Uriah suddenly jerked away, treading water as Colt swam his way up to the surface. Thousands of ants floated toward shore, all of them gathering together to form a raft on the top of the water. As far as he was concerned, that was a promise: the ants were gettin’ ready for a second attack, and he had no intention of being present for it.

“Damned things,” Uriah sighed, pulling himself back out of the water. “Gonna have bites for days. We’ll show up in town and all those kind folk will think we’ve got the pox.”

Colt couldn’t help but agree with him. He heaved himself out of the pond away from the ants, just in case they had a notion about climbing all over him again. Given a few minutes, he and Uriah managed to find their clothes, shake the last few ants off, and settled against a large elm, Colt watching the campsite in the distance for any sign of a man, or a woman, having noticed them.

He pulled out a knife, picked up a stick, and began whittling. “If they’re down there, they didn’t see a thing.”

“Good,” The single word meant more than Colt wanted to admit to himself.

Uriah’s pa had been a savior to Colt, Uriah himself more like a brother. Without them, he’d have been just another dead young man some poor soul found under a tree weeks or months later. Maybe he’d have ended up somethin’s lunch, like his folks had. Hearing Uriah agree with him had the same effect that hearing Uriah’s pa had had.

It’d been years since he’d run under the old man, bustin’ down doors or shooting when their prey ran off into the night, trying to escape.

Still meant more than it should’ve, especially at his age.

A click drew Colt’s attention from his stick. Uriah had retrieved his rifle and checked the ammunition inside it. Colt hesitated before he cleared his throat. “No reason to do that. They’ll sit until dark. Easier to sneak up on them then than in broad daylight.”

“I’m sick of waitin’ around,” Uriah muttered, more to himself than to Colt. “Get the job done, go back to town, find a good woman for the night. Get it over with.”

Uriah’d always been keen on the job before. Get it done? Get it over with? That wasn’t like him. Colt tossed the stick away and stood upright, easily shadowed in the tree’s branches. Not that their prey was bothering to look up or around, anyway. “You all right?”

“Don’t ask me shit like that,” Uriah said, locking the rifle once more.

As Colt tried to gather his words to make an argument, Uriah marched off. The last hundred feet or so, Uriah dropped to the ground and crept along it. Colt had no choice but to follow, mind racing as he did. When he got within range, he fell to his belly once again, too, keeping an eye out for those damned ants.

“Listen,” Uriah said, voice so quiet Colt was certain a man standing two feet from them would never hear him. “Listen. Here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna take out the extra two. When they’re gone, Moss will probably try to take off. When he does, I’ll put a hole in him the size of Texas. Then we’ll go on down and clean up. Understand?”

Colt shook his head. “Stupid to do this before dark. You know better.”

“You know what I know better than, Colt?” Uriah growled. “Than to sit around and wait all damn day.”

He’d been around guns for too many years to jump when one went off, but he nearabout did when Uriah punctuated his sentence with his first shot. Colt heard a man down in the camp bellow like a wounded bull moose. Another shot rang out and one of the horses bolted across the clearing, trailing blood into the woods from a gut shot.

Colt gritted his teeth. There were times a man had to shoot a horse out from another man, but plenty of times you could bring the horse in unharmed and make a little money on the side when you sold it off to someone else in town. “Well, then,” Colt sighed, shouldering his rifle. “Might as well get on with it.”

As he checked his sights, Harold Moss charged out of his tent and into the fray. The man was in a pair of breeches and a gun belt, but nothing else. He levered a revolver in their direction and fired, the shot going wide but not wide enough for Colt’s comfort. The man had a hell of an eye.

Moss’s first man was cut down by Uriah in the same moment, blood blossoming on his shirt as he staggered backward and fell. Colt hardly took notice as another shot sliced past his head, and he steadied himself to get to work on the second man. He’d thought the men were just lackeys, but there was a family resemblance that made him wonder if the dying man on the ground and the one he was aiming at were relatives of their prey, maybe even brothers or cousins.

And for one horrible second, he paused as he sat his rifle in his lap. He remembered the blood, the stench of it thick on the dusty trail. He remembered his uncles, glassy-eyed and still in the road, the buzzards tearing their guts out for all to see.

Colt remembered his ma reaching for him only to fall away. Blood everywhere.

So much blood it’d gone on to taint his adulthood, too.

Something buzzed near his ear, and he flinched at the burn of it. One of the men firing from down below had gotten more than a little lucky. Blood, more of it, dripped down to his shirt collar. That irritated Colt.

Hefting the gun, he settled the butt against his shoulder once again and eyed the scene. Uriah took down the second man, a fella that fell and died exactly the same way as the first had. As all men did when they faced down a good rifle with a better marksman.

There was a cold he felt about himself before he ended a man’s life. That chill settled over his shoulders and took hold of him, unwilling to let go. Colt followed Harold Moss as he ran toward the trees. Then Colt let out a slow, quiet breath and squeezed the trigger.

Harold Moss screamed and smashed into the ground, rolling twice over as momentum carried him. He left a trail of crimson in his wake everywhere that his knee touched. Colt wrinkled his nose. He preferred a clean kill; less miserable for everyone in the long run that way. 

“He’s too far out of range. We’re gonna have to go get him.”

“Son of a bitch,” Uriah snarled, dragging himself up to his feet. “Swear to God, you’re a worse shot every damned day.”

Colt slung his rifle over his shoulder then snaked through the leather to wear it across his body. “It took you ten shots to kill two men.”

“Quit yer yappin’.”

A flicker of something warm penetrated all that cold. However many family members he’d lost, at least he’d gained one he’d have forever. He slung his arm around Uriah’s shoulder. Uriah grumbled as the two of them made their way down to Moss’s camp, eyes peeled for anyone who might be sneaking around or hiding in the trees.

Truth be told, Colt doubted that anyone would risk much for Moss. He’d murdered someone, but plenty of people had. These days, most of them got brought in. Moss hadn’t really made any sort of profit from his killing, either.

If Moss had been part of a big gang of bad men, he’d have had plenty of folks to put in the trees and hide out along the road to slaughter people like Colt and Uriah. As it was, it seemed Moss’s men, maybe his brothers or cousins, weren’t really in the murdering business and they’d fallen victim to their friend-and-or-relative’s stupid decision to kill a man.

But it was better to be safe rather than sorry. And Colt kept his eyes busy watching the surrounding area.

Uriah slid away from him, boots skidding on the steep incline. Colt moved ahead, stomping down on the ground to try to clear it for Uriah. The climb down was as treacherous as it was up. Good vantage points often were. A man felt safe with a wall of dirt at his back and a hell of a lot of trees to hide in. If Colt were on the run, he’d have picked Moss’s final stand as a camping place, too.

Colt’s feet gave way, warmth spreading down his back as he dropped and rolled. He ordered his hands to catch himself but no part of his body wanted to listen. Nothing responded. He rolled the thirty feet down the hill to the bottom and shuddered as he tried to make himself stand.

No part of him responded and his mind searched for a reason for that, for something that had happened. Had he turned his ankle and taken that bad of a spill down the hill? The world wasn’t kind to a man who couldn’t get his legs up under himself.

“Colt.”

Uriah’s voice called to him, but there wasn’t a lick of kindness in it. He sounded as cold as Colt had felt only a moment ago.

Barely managing it, Colt tucked his hand up the back of his vest and felt the bullet hole still hot against the leather. His breath came thready and weak, but he managed to call back. “I been shot.”

“I know.”

Colt’s heart stilled in his chest as Uriah loomed over him, the gun’s barrel still smoking. It couldn’t be. They’d grown up as brothers, ridden the roads together; hell, they’d even shared a woman or two over the years. 

How could he?

Uriah levered his pistol at Colt’s head. Strained though he was, Colt managed to speak. “Why? We’ve been like family.”

“You know why,” Uriah said, peeling back the hammer. 

The gun exploded, and the world went dark as Uriah left him bleeding in the summer sun.


OFFER: A BRAND NEW SERIES AND 2 FREEBIES FOR YOU!

Grab my new series, "Legends of the Lawless Frontier", and get 2 FREE novels as a gift! Have a look here!




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