Read Online The Graves at Seven Devils by Peter Brandvold - Free Book Online Page A

Prophet’s lower legs, dead.
    â€œMa!” Emmitt Sanderson cried, leaping toward his mother.
    He didn’t make it. A bullet took him through the high center of his chest. He flew backward, arms flailing straight out from his shoulders, as the other two men screamed and leaped around, raising their revolvers and trying to get a bead on the shooter.
    There were four more rifle shots, booming reports spaced split seconds apart and echoing around the valley like thunderclaps. Prophet, on his back as before with Horton Whipple still straddling him, stared up in disbelief as Cisco and Rodney Hayes danced bizarre death jigs above and around him, screaming as bullets plunked through their chests and bellies, tearing out chunks of flesh, blood, and viscera and splashing the weeds and rocks around them with several shades of red.
    Finally, both men were down, Cisco lying off to Prophet’s left while Rodney lay straight out from his boots, belly down, one arm curled beneath him. He shook, farted, sighed, and lay still.
    Prophet looked up the long, gentle slope on his right. A man with a rifle stepped out from behind a lone boulder and swung into the saddle of a brown-and-white pinto pony. All Prophet could think was that another outlaw—possibly one double-crossed by these four and their mother—had come to even the score. How the bushwhacker knew Prophet wasn’t a member of the gang, Prophet couldn’t say.
    He was just glad to not be shaking hands with El Diablo.
    As the rider trotted the pinto down the hill, weaving around cedars and junipers, Prophet heaved aside Whipple’s heavy carcass. Mrs. Sanderson lay sprawled across his shins, staring toward him with a fist-sized hole in her forehead and her tobacco-stained tongue lolling out the side of her mouth.
    Prophet lifted his back, pulled his right leg out from beneath the dead woman, planted his boot against her face, and gave her an unceremonious shove. She rolled off his other boot to tumble facedown in the weeds with a postmortem gurgle.
    Prophet grimaced as he rolled onto his right elbow. His crotch resumed burning and his balls felt as though they’d swollen up twice their normal size. He turned to watch the rider approach on his pinto.
    Her pinto.
    The young woman’s long, straw-colored hair bounced across her shoulders and down the striped serape that couldn’t quite conceal the two matronly lumps beneath.
    As she came closer, her face grew gradually clearer. Prophet would have recognized the heart-shaped bone structure, bee-stung lips, pug nose, and wide-set, crystalline hazel eyes anywhere—all shaded by a man’s flat-brimmed black hat trimmed with a snakeskin band. It was a face so teeming with peaches-and-cream sweetness and persnickety schoolgirl charm that no one but Prophet would have believed the girl behind it was capable of playing hooky from school, much less gunning down a passel of pistol-packing varmints from a hundred yards uphill without one wasted bullet.
    â€œLouisa, don’t you beat all?” Prophet gave an angry chuff and slapped the ground as the girl drew the pinto up before him. “Just when I was about to get the upper hand on that lummox, you start shootin’ away like Billy the Kid. If you think you’re gettin’ any of the bounty money, you got another think comin’.”
    Prophet gained his feet, moving gingerly, his balls still throbbing, and looked up at Louisa, not yet twenty years old but sitting her saddle with customary self-assuredness, the breeze playing with her hair. “Besides, they were all wanted alive . They ain’t any good to me dead !”
    â€œI think,” the girl said, leaning forward on her saddle horn, the barrel of her Sharps still smoking faintly, “that you should be kissing my boots instead of berating me. That oaf was about to cut your head clean off your shoulders. They would have thrown your uncouth, mangy, smelly carcass in the