Dust paled the black gleam of Gracie's hooves. The mare stood left of a long wooden bridge, ears flipped toward the pleasant burble of water below. By now the sun had sank to an angry seam on the curtain of twilight. Stars peppered the darkening sky. The last rays bounced off ruddy dirt and juniper scrubland as the shadows in a carved signpost deepened.

Opposite the sun, the moon was on the rise.

The sign sat at the edge of a river's waterfall, marking the entrance to the only town within a day's ride of the cliff palace. The waterfall never roared, not unless the previous winter had brought heavy snows. The most it did was pour onto the rocks below like a heavy rainstorm. It gathered into a deep, spring-fed pool that curved around the town's tall island then bled out into the scrub. 

The town itself—well, there was little to see from shore, only high walls of wood and rusted steel with a singular drawbridge. From Diego's vantage point near that bridge, there was nothing but strung lanterns in the town's entrance, flashing yellow flames that leered out at the dying sun. Only way in was by crossing this bridge, and every night around this time it swung up and wouldn't swing back down, not for no one, until sunrise. 

It was still flat tonight, soaked and slippery from the day's ventures.

Diego glanced back at the red horizon. A few more minutes and they might have missed the bridge completely. He swatted flies off Gracie's hindquarters, looped her reins in one gloved hand, and walked closer to the sign.

"Green Grotto. Happiest place in earth," he read, chapped lips working out the letters. Reading had been a novelty introduced to him by the English big game hunters. Though he didn't like to admit it, he practiced when he could, usually out in the wilderness beside a crackling fire. Bibles and dead men's letters mostly.  Never was much more reading material around than that.

Men like Diego knew how to count things like coins and bullets, knew how to fight and survive. That was why he always ended up with the contents of other men's pockets. He never bought one of those printed newspapers or shopped for books.

But reading was enjoyable in the right circumstance, and he hadn't read these words on this sign in quite some years.

Taking tender steps, Gracie headed down the rocky embankment for the running water.

"Drink soon," he promised the mare, guiding her back onto the slick bridge in slow, measured steps. Old planks shuddered, groaned, and held. He glanced over his shoulder. The short brush was still, but the night insects buzzed louder than the water.

Out in these wild nights, it wasn't safe to lower your head for a drink or a piss.  You needed that deep water, like what cut around the small town, if you wanted to do anything in peace. The Demon was rumored to be afraid of the substance, never crossing anything that ran over its chest. Long as that water kept falling and the town's inner spring kept filling, the inhabitants spent their nights in relative safety. Summer droughts always had them clutching their guns a bit tighter underneath the glow of a full moon, though.

Walking up to the glare of the first lantern, he saw evidence of why. Massive claws raked across sections of wood and steel. Every tear looked weathered, made in the early fall he guessed, when the water would've been lowest. He took a long look at the water's dim surface, wondering how deep it ran tonight.

Diego knew animals,  and he knew the demon weighed far more than any north American bear, larger even than the grizzled predators of the new state of California. It wasn't afraid of water: it was far more likely that the damned thing couldn't swim well.

At the far end of the bridge he stood Gracie beside the entrance and walked down to the rushing edge. He filled the brim of his hat with substance then carried it back up to the mare to wash the dust from her pretty face. Water dripped from the brim as he set it back on his head. 

"'Evening, traveler," came a voice as cool as a graveyard wind. A tall man in an onyx cavalry great coat approached.  The man opened each swinging lantern and blew out the candles within. "Any more after you?" he asked, fixing a long stare on Diego and then at a silver pocketwatch on his shirt.

Diego shook his head. "None quick enough."

The man chewed his lip, thumbed toward the cool, damp depths of the town. "Head on to the grotto if you're wanting a drink. You want somewhere to rest your head or knock some boots, try the tavern."

Diego thanked him and lead Gracie down the abandoned streets. Even in a secured town, folks were never keen on breathing the same air as the stuff of nightmares. Homes and businesses here, at least those close to the groaning barrier walls, were built a fair bit taller than in other areas of the world, on a stilted system that kept the place from washing away in those heavy spring thaws. It wasn't until you scaled the island's lone hill that there was any sense of normalcy. That was where the richest men lived, and where the bar and the apothecary were stationed, and a small stable had been built for horses after too many had broken loose and fled for the hill every night.

But that one and only hill held a secret in its damp heart.

The Green Grotto was a primitive sanctuary beneath parched earth in a cave at the island's center: an underground series of narrow chasms and mossy boulders. White water poured into dark emerald depths, filling pools that never ran dry, not even in the blistering summer. There wasn't anything like it, not that he'd seen, in all the world.

Rumor was that some ancient, long-forgotten people—older even than his mother's lineage—had carved these caves and offered human sacrifices in the part where the water lay darkest. If you held your lantern close enough to the black surface, residents said, you might glimpse some poor bastard's bones.

Rumor was that the beast of Anasazi had first emerged beneath the blazing full moon when the nearby villagers had stopped drowning each other in the grotto.

Tonight Diego bypassed the grotto's cavernous entrance and the moist air it belched into the early evening. The stables would water and feed Gracie just fine. He never liked the grotto in the daylight, let alone in the pitch black. Always felt alive to him, like he was standing in a giant's rib cage.

He didn't remember the name of the stables or the tavern as they climbed the hill toward music and lights, but then he didn't care for many names at all. What was a name to a wanderer but another memory, and what was a memory but another ghost? Another dead thing. The preachers he'd met and the girls who'd tried to settle him down could keep their promises of happy memories to come. Diego had enough of those and he knew how they always ended: with more names and more dead things and the last memory he had of each  was always the worst.

The only good thing he had to his name was Gracie. She was ten. Horses lived a lot longer and grander than that, but Gracie didn't live a nice horse's life. He was sorry to do it to her, but there wasn't no way out to the palace without a horse, or any better way to travel to some of the remote locations where he hunted. Not unless you planned on dying before you got there. 

The man hitched Gracie to a post, talked to a stablehand about accommodations, and then opened the door to the loudest, smokiest place in town: the tavern. 

Close quarters in traveler's towns were filled with a kind of reluctant acceptance of strangers that could change in an instant: an undercurrent of hostility and hatred tempered by fear and booze. If you wanted to feel like a human, if you didn't want to feel like a rat waiting for the cat to pass, you came to the tavern and you got drunk enough to forget what lurked on the far side of the river. Those wanting to skip town left at dawn and prayed their horses had good enough legs to get them well clear of the cliff palace.

A piano rolled out tunes over the clamor of rowdy poker games and idle chitchat. The thick atmosphere didn't thin for the new arrival, and when he'd managed to get himself a seat by a bar,  Diego slipped his hat onto his thigh and ordered a shot of whiskey.

The bartender was a middle-aged, barrel-chested man with a handsomer mustache than Diego could ever hope to grow. He had a clean smile and the calloused knuckles of a man ready to uphold order. 

"You got a problem?" the man asked, sliding the glass his way.

"Sir, I don't," Diego said, downing the shot. To his tongue the taste seemed a weak burn. He gestured for another, then leaned back at a musical giggle. Women. At least a dozen, about half of whom wore gaudy colors and draped themselves coyly against their drunken scenery. "Less you count the fact I haven't seen a woman in two months."

The bartender laughed and followed his gaze. "Lucky for you, we got some answers for that."

Diego watched the women for a couple minutes. They were roses in the desert, beautiful but creased with the lines of a hard life. He liked that. He liked the ones that acted like themselves. They weren't pretending like the ladies of European courts or fine southern estates. They felt more real to him, and something real sounded pretty good on the eve of what was to be his final hunt.

His eyes lingered on each, wondering what they'd be like in bed, but there was one that moved among them unlike any other.  He downed the next shot, but it seemed weaker than the first, for all his attention fell on her.

She was well-made, short and muscular with a silhouette almost as straight as a man's. Golden brown skin. Dark hair piled atop her head in a braided bun and pinned with a couple flowers.  Pretty to the right man or woman, but intimidating to all. She didn't want no one in this room. She stared through them as if they were already ghosts. The woman walked like a jaguar among the patrons, every action swift and decisive. Her dress, an embroidered white blouse with an ankle-length black skirt hemmed in floral designs, undermined her confident strides with a delicate feline grace. 

That woman spoke now with a couple young men deep in a deck of cards, rubbing a shoulder here, purring into an ear there. Fierce Mississippi eyes focused on her suitors, but watched the entire room carefully.

That is, until one of the men grabbed her waist and jerked her onto his thigh.

She gasped, a high, false sound, and frowned. "You know better than that, Roy. You don't have the coin for me," she said, and rose in a fragrant swirl of black.

Roy, a young gent with a cigar and a clean shirt, held her wrist.  He flashed his cards to her. "Minute more and I'll afford you and Silvia."

The woman cast a long look at the other card players- they folded, all but one. As promised, with a triumphant holler Roy took the game's winnings not a minute later. 

"So what do you say we put this money back in this fine establishment?" Roy continued, brushing her cheek with a folded bill.

The woman pulled away. "Silvia!" she called. A brown-haired vixen looked up from beside the piano. 

Roy waved her off, grabbed the woman's waist and dragged her back onto his lap. "You're tense, Coa, I can see that, but you don't have to worry. That moon's on the rise, but you'll be safe with me."

Coa leaned her head against Roy's forehead, draping her arm around his neck. "My daddy ain't gonna like this," she began. "I'm engaged."

"He'll like the money," Roy said, kissing her neck. 

"You better hope my daddy gets down here—" Ah, one of those girls, always crying for daddy when they got in too deep; Diego thought, mildly disappointed. "—before I've hauled your fat ass across the bridge."

Diego looked back at the woman with renewed interest.

The man beside Diego pressed his stinking shirt against his shoulder. "Seen her do it," he whistled through missing teeth. "Fella was being rowdy, grabbing at one of the girls. Punched him out cold. Coa grabbed that knife there, see it, one hanging by the onion bag? Well she took that knife and rolled him flat right at our very feet. Cut his ass clean off and carried it over the bridge for the Demon."

"Ned's got it exact," the girl went on, hand on her hip, a small knife in hand. She pressed a little line across Roy's waistcoat, quick enough to loose a button but not much else. "Even if he got some of the details wrong. It isn't clean, you know, slicing off anything south of a man's belly." She let the knife hop down his chest, teasing the point against his crotch. 

Roy had gone white. Coa slid off his stumbled apologies and waved Silvia on over to tend to the man.  She'd smoothed down her dress front and sidled up beside the bar, next to Ned, the wizened talker, and got him a free drink. 

"Coaxoch," she said, turning dark eyes on Diego. "Coa, if you want something that can still roll off the tongue drunk."

Diego drummed the hat on his thigh. "That's all?"

"What else I need?"  She paused, hand outstretched. "Besides your money. Room and board and you owe Patrick here for drinks, I'm guessing. Only thing I don't know is how long you're in town."

"Tonight," he grunted. "Be gone tomorrow."

Her lips formed a thin frown. "I saw you watching me, you know. It's true what Ned said, and what I said to Roy there. Mostly, anyway. When Amos Flannigan cut my girls, I cut something else off him. And I'm an engaged woman now, not up for sale."

Diego looked at his drink. "Just looking for a bed to rent tonight, not a warm body."

Her shoulders rolled forward the more she leaned toward him. "You ain't planning on trouble, are you? We don't welcome that sort here." He shook his head, and though she leered at him, she didn't find enough trouble in his face to kick him out of the tavern. Her hand slid along his arm, down onto his thigh. She nipped his ear. "You sure look like you want to test me, those doe eyes of yours are calling."

"Two months since he's seen breasts," the bartender cut in. 

Coa laughed.

Diego lifted her hand away from his lap, turned his shoulders against the table. "I'm not looking for trouble," he insisted in a low voice, feeling heat rise in his lower body. "I'm hunting it down at the cliff palace tomorrow morning."

Another shot dropped on the counter. Coa slid onto the seat beside him, hissing an order at Ned to find a corner to sleep in. "What's got you chasing death, cowboy?" she asked after man had slunk off.

Diego spared her a sideways glance, took the lady's shot and downed it. "What's made anyone ever chase death? Revenge."