The Liar in the Barn

Tlalli

How many times could you run a brass bore brush down a rifle barrel before the steel forgot the scent of your own mate?

I sat on a three-legged stool in the ranch tack room. The smell of neat’s-foot oil, saddle soap, and Hoppe’s No. 9 solvent hung thick in the dry air, sharp enough to make my eyes water. On the workbench before me, my Winchester Model 94 lay stripped down to its receiver and lever assembly.

My hands were shaking.

I picked up a cotton patch, soaked it in gun oil, and shoved the brass cleaning rod through the breech. It emerged from the muzzle with a soft, greasy hiss.

Clean. The barrel was spotless. I had cleaned it three times in forty minutes.

Yet every time I pulled air into my lungs, I didn't smell solvent. I didn't smell the cedar shavings on the floor or the sweat-stained leather saddles hanging from the wall racks.

I smelled her.

Scorched sheet metal. Battery acid and cheap citrus wash. The hot, dark tang of crushed flint under an August sun.

My chest burned. The skin across my knuckles throbbed with a persistent, electric sizzle, like I had thrust both hands into a bucket of live fence wire. It had been three hours since we rolled in the dry dirt of the arroyo. Three hours since my fingers had slipped inside her torn collar and closed around the warm, bare skin of her throat.

Mate.

The word dropped into my head like a stone into an empty well.

My inner wolf paced behind my ribcage. Her claws dragged against the meat of my lungs, whining a high, miserable note that made my molars ache. She didn't care about the thirty-year border feud. She didn't care that our cattle were dying of thirst in the north pasture. She only wanted me to drop the rifle, jump in my flatbed truck, and drive back to the highway wash until we found the woman with the scarred boots and the lethal gray eyes.

Quiet, I told her, pressing the heel of my palm against my breastbone. She's Macario's enforcer. She's the butcher who breaks bones for the truck stop Alpha.

My wolf didn't give a damn. She huffed, curled her tail tight around her nose, and showed me a memory of Ocotlan's mouth—hard, fierce, parted in shock right before she threw me into the mesquite brush.

"Dammit," I muttered under my breath.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my canvas work pants.

On the corner of the workbench sat the small evidence bag I had gathered before sprinting away from the well. Inside lay three coarse, wiry hairs plucked from a rusted strand of barbed wire three feet above the culvert, along with the spent brass casing from my own rifle.

The fur wasn't gray wolf pelt. It was pale buff, tipped with black, smelling of grease and desert brush.

Coyote.

Ocotlan had been telling the truth. The highway wolves hadn't poured solvent down our communal wellhead. Someone else had hauled the industrial poison into our valley on four narrow paws.

If I told my brother that, would he listen?

I looked up at the wall calendar tacked beside the door. A faded photo of the Davis Mountains, courtesy of the local feed store. Today was Tuesday. By Thursday, our holding tanks would drop below the intake valves. By Friday, our hundred-and-twenty-head cow-calf herd would be drinking mud and alkali salt.

Yaretzi didn't have the patience for a forensic debate. When my brother saw blood on the fence, he loaded shotguns.

The heavy wooden door of the tack room swung open with a screech of dry hinges.

Mateo stood in the doorway, blocking the harsh afternoon glare.

He was Yaretzi’s lead enforcer, six-foot-two of thick muscle and bad intentions, wearing a sweat-stained Stetson and a denim vest over bare, sun-darkened shoulders. A heavy leather bandolier of twelve-gauge shells was slung across his chest. He smelled like cheap cigarillos, horse lather, and unwashed adrenaline.

"There you are," Mateo said, resting a heavy hand on the butt of the revolver at his hip. "Your brother wants you in the main barn. Now."

I picked up the Winchester’s walnut stock, slotted it into the tang, and tightened the screw with two smooth turns of a flathead screwdriver.

"I'm cleaning my rifle, Mateo," I said without looking up. "Tell him I'll be there in five minutes."

"He didn't say five minutes, Tlalli." Mateo stepped inside, the spurs on his boots clinking against the concrete slab. "He said now. The inner council is sitting. We're picking targets."

A cold weight dropped into the pit of my stomach.

"Targets?" I asked, setting the screwdriver on the bench with deliberate care.

"Macario crossed the line," Mateo said, a nasty grin spreading across his stubbled jaw. "Two of our heifers died in the lower draw this morning. Foaming at the lips, guts melted out. Yaretzi is done talking about treaties."

I picked up my assembled rifle, racked the lever once to verify the feed mechanism, and clicked the safety into place.

"Nobody crosses the highway until we know what we're shooting at," I said.

Mateo laughed, a dry, grating bark that made my wolf bristle. "You track the dirt, little sister. Leave the shooting to the men who know how to pull a trigger."

I slid the Winchester into the leather scabbard slung over my shoulder, grabbed the plastic evidence bag off the bench, and walked straight toward him. I didn't slow down. Mateo held his ground for two seconds before the cold look in my eyes forced him to take half a step backward into the sunlight.

Rank was an unspoken thing on our ranch, but blood was absolute.

I was the Alpha's sister. Mateo was just the muscle Yaretzi hired to fix fence posts and shoot coyotes.

"Watch your tongue, Mateo," I said as I brushed past his shoulder. "Before I make you clean those cow pens with a toothbrush."

·  ·  ·

The main barn was ninety feet of corrugated steel and weathered oak timbers, smelling of sweet alfalfa, damp earth, and horse liniment.

It was also where my family planned its funerals and its wars.

In the center of the threshing floor, beneath a string of yellow incandescent work lights, twelve pack warriors stood around a makeshift table built from two wooden sawhorses and an unpainted sheet of plywood. At the far end of the barn, an old tube television sat on a feed barrel, murmuring the static hum of a local Spanish radio station out of Presidio.

Yaretzi stood at the head of the plywood table.

My older brother looked like a man who hadn't slept in three weeks. His black hair was chopped unevenly at his collar, his cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass under his dark skin. A jagged white scar from an old mountain lion run ran from his left temple down into his thick jawline. He wore a heavy wool ranch coat despite the ninety-degree heat inside the barn, his broad shoulders hunched over a hand-drawn map of the county line.

The air around him was heavy, saturated with Alpha command that made the younger wolves near the door drop their chins toward their chests.

"Tlalli," Yaretzi called out as I stepped into the shadows of the barn.

The pack fighters parted to let me through. Men I had known since childhood—vaqueros, trackers, cousin-brothers who had taught me how to shoot jackrabbits at fifty yards—looked at me with hollow, hungry eyes. They were terrified. A wolf pack without water was a pack of dead wolves walking.

"You took your sweet time," Yaretzi said. His voice was a low, sandpaper rasp.

"I was securing my perimeter," I replied, stepping up to the edge of the plywood table.

I unslung my Winchester and leaned it against the sawhorse. Beside Yaretzi’s elbow lay an array of greasy scrap paper, box lids from Remington rifle cartridges, and three empty brown bottles of Lone Star beer.

"Did you reach the arroyo well?" he demanded.

His dark eyes fixed on mine, burning with the frantic, feverish intensity that had been growing in him since the drought took the eastern springs. He stepped closer. His nose twitched once, testing the air.

My pulse jumped.

Did he smell her? Did the reek of Hoppe's solvent and leather cover the faint, electric tang of Ocotlan’s skin?

I kept my chin level. I had lied to my brother about breaking fence gates when I was seven; I had lied to him about sneaking out to the river dances when I was sixteen. But this wasn't a dance. This was high treason against the bloodline.

"I reached the wellhead," I said steadily.

"And?" Yaretzi leaned forward, planting both scarred palms flat against the map. "Did you find Macario’s filth?"

"I found poison," I said.