Blood Curse: Book 2 of the Blood War Chronicles Read online

  Praise for Blood Curse

  “Prepare for shocks, grit, and a voice you’ll want to read forever.”

  ~ #1 NYT Bestselling Author Sherrilyn Kenyon

  “Just like the first book in the series, Blood Ties, Blood Curse pulls you along on Jake and Cole's wild ride across the West. Quincy does a great job blending magic with steampunk and wrapping it in the grittiness of a western. I didn't want to put this one down, and almost missed my bus stop a couple of times! I highly recommend the series. You won't be disappointed.”

  ~ Niara

  “Quincy Allen offers a brisk, thoughtful story that weaves together the necessary tropes to create a satisfying Steampunk adventure…. The tight prose draws you into an evocative tale that spins on intrigue and double-crosses. Go for it.”

  ~ Mario Acevedo, Acclaimed Author and Artist

  Book Description

  In a world of magic, a clockwork gunslinger must stop a demon apocalypse from wiping out two worlds. Starting in an old west you’d mostly recognize, this six-book series journeys beyond the boundaries of our own world and becomes an epic fantasy tale culminating in a demon war that tears deep… straight into the heart of Texas.

  Ancient Foes

  •

  Airship Battles

  •

  A Hidden City

  THE BLOOD WAR CHRONICLES

  A ruddy sun has set on the gauntlet that nearly killed Jake and his companions in San Francisco. Storm clouds loom on the horizon, promising the inevitability of an airship battle with the nefarious Colonel Szilágyi.…

  Blood Curse, the second book in the Blood War Chronicles, drops Jake into the middle of a war between the Free Territories and the Empire of Texas. In the shadow of warships, mechanized infantry, and spies, he discovers a world he couldn’t possibly have imagined and begins to understand what fate has in store for him.

  Jake doesn’t want that destiny, but his growing feelings for the Lady Corina Dănești lead him down a path of death and destruction on a scale that could encompass worlds.

  BLOOD CURSE

  Second Edition

  Copyright © 2015 Quincy J. Allen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  Cover artwork and design by Kirk DouPonce

  www.dogeareddesign.com

  Edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  Book Design by RuneWright, LLC

  www.RuneWright.com

  Published by

  RuneWright Publishing

  Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

  RuneWright Digital Edition February 2018

  Contents

  Praise for Blood Curse

  Book Description

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One The Smell of Blood and Canvas

  Chapter Two The Calm Before the Storm

  Chapter Three Three Little Blackbirds

  Chapter Four Defending a Lady’s Honor

  Chapter Five Breath of Life

  Chapter Six Lady Down

  Chapter Seven Bloody Trail

  Chapter Eight River Ride

  Chapter Nine Legless Memory

  Chapter Ten Crossroads

  Chapter Eleven Pandora Celtica

  Chapter Twelve The White Mare

  Chapter Thirteen A Stirring of Hearts

  Chapter Fourteen The Secret of Roswell

  Chapter Fifteen A Roswell Hoedown

  Chapter Sixteen Tears for the Sun

  Chapter Seventeen Unwelcome Guests

  Chapter Eighteen Gatekeepers

  Chapter Nineteen Through the Breach

  Chapter Twenty Into the Fire

  Chapter Twenty-one Combat Tactics

  Chapter Twenty-two Last Stand

  Chapter Twenty-three One Last Detail

  Chapter Twenty-four Homecoming

  Chapter Twenty-five The Call of Duty

  Chapter Twenty-six Eternal Sunrise

  The End of:

  If You Liked …

  About the Author

  Dedication

  This one is dedicated to Steve Austin and James West and James Retief and James Bond and Rooster Cogburn and Blondie (The Good) and Josie Wales and a bunch of other fictional heroes who kept me company on Saturday mornings. It is also dedicated to every Buffalo Soldier that ever lived and to the Native American peoples of this continent who held—and hold—the land dear.

  Chapter One

  The Smell of Blood and Canvas

  “Only a few of us knew about Jake’s dreams, the horrors he relived night after night. But those of us who knew and watched him keep going … we knew he was a man who wouldn’t give up. Ever.”

  ~ Captain Jane Wilson

  A distant tugging dragged Jake out of comfortable oblivion. From around some unseen bend, a single hiss of steam—as if a locomotive had lurched forward then changed its mind—faded away to a begging silence. The silence became a phrase, a sentence—something with meaning that eluded Jake’s clouded thoughts. A jolting wet crunch of bone punctuated that sentence, stirring within him a deepening horror that lifted him out of the darkness.

  A single vibration tickled the base of his neck and shivered its way to the crown of his skull. A wave of nausea flooded through him. Jake opened his eyes slowly and discovered his left eye was covered by a bandage around his head. His right eye, however, took in spatters and streaks of ruddy brown marring a surface of filthy, gray canvas.

  He recognized it as the wall of an army tent. The scent of death filled his nostrils, etching itself into his memory. Corpses and limbs, the stench of voided bowels and destroyed lives, it all pressed down on him like hot sand, and he knew in that instant he would never forget the smell.

  The deep, throaty screams of men in agony filtered into his brain, as if through thick cotton, slowly reaching a maddening clarity. Screaming and moaning and cursing became a not-so-subtle backdrop to his growing awareness, reminding him of Jackinaw Ridge. It occurred to him that he wasn’t the one screaming, and that led him to the realization that he couldn’t feel anything. His last memory was of blinding agony, but a disquieting absence had replaced that pain. His body felt numb. Aside from the side of his face, he couldn’t even feel what he lay upon. Jake wanted to tremble, but he couldn’t. The thought of paralysis clutched and clawed at him.

  If given a choice between paralysis or death, he’d take death every time.

  More tugging forced Jake to turn his head, the only thing he could move. His gaze fell upon the roof, another version of the wall, with patterns of blood—leaves in a teacup—telling tales of men and their struggles with death. None of the streaks indicated who had won, who had lost. They merely marked another agonized battlefield, and Jake couldn’t help but wonder if his own tale would be written there in the hours ahead.

  Another insistent tug drew Jake’s eyes to drift down toward his feet. An almost white sheet covered his torso, and someone had strapped his body to the army cot. A rolling curtain of blood-streaked linen partitioned Jake off from the rest of what appeared to be a very large army tent.

  A portly man with a crown of white hair, his back turned to Jake, fiddled with a machine nearby. Jake assumed the man was a doctor. Through the fog, Jake recognized the machine as a steam driven log splitter. His n
eighbor had used one for years before Jake left home. This one was modified, however, and the reality of its terrible purpose hit Jake like a thunderclap.

  A macabre tinkerer had replaced the splitter blade assembly. In its stead, the machine wielded a gruesome swing-arm equipped with an iris of gleaming steel big enough to encircle a man’s leg. That ring of blades hovered around his left leg only a few inches below his hip. At his groin, a black belt bit deeply into his exposed flesh, cinched tightly enough to turn the flesh beneath the blades a sickening shade of blue-white.

  Jake’s right leg ended at the same location, wrapped in blood-soaked bandages, and there was no doubt what was about to happen.

  The doctor reached out his hand and pulled a lever at the back of the machine. Terrified, Jake’s voice caught in his throat. There was the hiss of steam, and Jake watched in helpless horror as the iris of steel closed slowly. The blades bit into his flesh like a butcher’s knife cuts into hogback. Metal hit bone. Another wave of nausea washed over Jake as steel clipped bone with a wet crunch. He heard a dull thud as what was left of his left leg hit the wooden floor below.

  Blind with terror, Jake’s screaming finally added itself to that of the men around him.

  He didn’t see the doctor jump and spin around. He didn’t hear the man shouting someone’s name and cursing about his patient being awake. All he saw were steel blades swinging away from his severed leg, the gleaming metal covered with streaks of blood and gobbets of flesh.

  A strong hand pushed down on Jake’s forehead, pinning his head to the cot. Mad with fear, he tried to struggle, tried to shake the hand free, but the hand kept him from moving. A woman’s voice whispered into his ear, “It’ll be alright.” A delicate hand placed a strange mask over his mouth and nose, its leather padding sealing around his face. He heard the hiss of gas. “Just breathe deeply,” the woman said, “and it will all go away.”

  Jake gasped within the mask and smelled poppies, reminding him of the opium dens he’d walked past in Kansas City and Chicago.

  Oblivion wrapped itself around him, and he thanked god for it.

  O O O

  Throbbing pain pulled Jake out of the darkness, and the stench of death nearly gagged him. He opened his right eye slowly and found the same patterns of old blood streaks across the tent. He was actually grateful that there weren’t new streaks, thinking they would have been his own. His left arm and both legs ached, as if all three lay crushed beneath anvils. He could feel the cot beneath him once again, although he still couldn’t move. Then he remembered the steel blades … the crunching bone … the sound of his leg hitting the floor like the piece of meat it had become. Part of him desperately wanted to look, to see what the rebels and the fat doctor had done to him. Fear clamped itself around his neck muscles, refusing to let him turn his head and discover the truth.

  “I’m really very sorry you woke up during the procedure.” It was a man’s voice, mellow and soothing to Jake’s ears. “It’s my fault, really. You were unconscious when they brought you in, and I thought you’d been given something to keep you out. We’d merely administered something to immobilize you.”

  Jake managed to turn his head to see the doctor standing at the foot of the bed, just beyond the stumps of what had been his legs. Tears welled up in his eye. He raised his left arm to wipe them away, and when his hand didn’t pass in front of his face, he turned his head all the way to the left so he could see what was wrong. His left arm ended a few inches down from his shoulder, and the stump was covered by more blood-soaked bandages tinged with yellow.

  Jake turned his face toward the ceiling, clamped his eye shut and let the tears flow. He could feel them running down the right side of his face as he let reality soak in. He’d always believed that Fate stood behind all men, waiting to inflict herself upon them. It was just his turn to feel her wrath.

  “Not your fault, Doc,” he finally said to break up the silence. “I take it I’m gonna live?”

  “At this junction, I’m convinced that you will indeed recover. There was a remarkable volume of blood lost. Frankly, I’m astonished—albeit gratefully so—that you were still alive when they brought you in. You had belts and rags tied around your injured limbs. They undoubtedly saved your life. You’re a lucky man, Captain.”

  Jake found himself grinning sadly at the phrase. He was neither lucky nor a captain. Not anymore. “Hmph … luck comes in all flavors, now don’t it?”

  The doctor was silent for a few heartbeats as Jake clenched and unclenched his remaining fist, satisfied that he could at least do that.

  It was something.

  “I can’t possibly imagine what you’re feeling, Captain, nor what you will have to endure in the months and years ahead. It would be both presumptuous and foolish—even insulting—for me to try. All I can say is that you came off that battlefield alive. You survived not one amputated limb, but three. You survived, Captain. A lot of men don’t in this godforsaken war.”

  Jake pondered it for a bit, finally opening his eye and reading the tales written in blood above him. He wasn’t paralyzed. “It’s certainly something to think about, Doc.”

  “Be certain you do just that, Captain. One can never lose hope, and you can never think for a second that your life ended on that battlefield. It didn’t. I don’t know if you’re a Godly man or not. I, for one, have seen too much bloodshed, and far too much of it shed in the name of God, to be a believer anymore. I cannot conceive of such a pitiless deity, one possessed of little more than rage and wanton delight in suffering.”

  Jake took a deep breath. “I haven’t talked to God in a long time, and what solace I took from the hereafter came more from what an old Cherokee taught me than anything else. That old man told me once ‘When you’re in a river of shit, you don’t stand still, you walk to the other side.’ As to the evil that men do, that’s just men. Neither God nor spirit’s got a thing to do with it.”

  The doctor nodded his head and shrugged. He laid his hand on the army cot gently. “By the way, there’s someone here who wishes to see you.”

  “I’d rather not see anyone, Doc. Not for a while.”

  “I’m afraid he made it an order, Captain.”

  Jake laughed once, a sad sound that stirred a gentle frown on the doctor’s face. “I guess Lady Fate ain’t quite done with me yet, is she, Doc?”

  “That’s one way to put it, Captain. Whether we believe it or not, Heaven, if you want to call it that, has a plan for us all. The only difference between one man and another is how he sees Heaven.” Without another word, the doctor turned and disappeared through the curtains still drawn around Jake’s bed.

  Jake closed his eye once again and tried to envision Heaven, as well as its caretaker. At first, he didn’t know how to start. He hadn’t been in a church since he left home, and then only on account of his mother. That got him to thinking about his life. Looking back, he realized he’d pretty much squandered it, all-too-frequently doing so selfishly. Always chasing one scheme after another.

  He didn’t have a thing to show for it aside from a short list of personal belongings—most of which were probably still up on Jackinaw, including a painted mare he would truly miss—and what little currency his father had left him after the brewery sale and a lot of debts paid off. Laying there, the cold clarity that he had no direction to go hit him like a sledgehammer.

  Hell, he thought, I didn’t have a direction before Jackinaw Ridge, not one the Army didn’t point me at, anyway.

  Jake had thanked God enough times, cursed him, taken his name in vain more times than he could count. But he never really thought about any of it.

  He let that sink in, and the thought of it stirred something deep within. Finally, he just figured he’d start talking and hope whomever was up there was in a listening mood.

  Well, I s’pose I’m talkin’ to God or the Great Spirit or whichever one of you is willing to listen. I ain’t talked to you in a while, not since I was in my teens. I reckon this is as good a
time as any for us to have a few words. First off, I want to thank you for them Buffalo Soldiers. I swear, that was the prettiest sight I ever seen. You take good care of ’em. The world needs more good men like that. And I want you to know I don’t blame you for what happened to me. Some men are lucky and some ain’t. That’s how this old world of yours turns, and I never believed otherwise. But here I am, only part of the man I used to be, and I could use a hand.

  Jake chuckled at his own pun.

  And a couple of legs, as long as I’m asking. Look, we both know I’m done in the Army, which I suppose is what I was asking for before Jackinaw. You got one hell of a sense of humor, I’ll give you that. I guess what I’m looking to do is make a deal. With or without your help, I figure I best get to living my life with a bit more purpose than I have. I don’t know how, but I swear I’ll do what I can to help folks when they need it. No more following orders. No more politics. Just doing what’s right. Okay? What I’m asking is that you find a way to help me get off this damn cot and back in the world. I don’t care what that means. I’ll leave it up to you if you’re of a mind to help one poor, dumb cowboy. I’d sure appreciate it. Either way, I’ll keep up my end of the bargain.

  Jake opened his good eye and let it trace around the blood on the ceiling, wondering how many other men had offered the same bargain and under the same circumstances.

  Amen, he added. Jake raised his good arm and held it in front of his face. He turned it this way and that, tightening his fingers into a fist and releasing each one slowly. “Let’s just hope one good arm is enough,” he said out loud.

  The curtain slid aside as a familiar but weary and hoarse voice said, “You’ll have more than that, Jake. So help me God.”

  Jake looked into the eyes of Colonel Forsythe, eyes haunted by demons Jake couldn’t guess at. Forsythe wore wrinkled, brown civvies, not his uniform, and it looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His bloodshot eyes looked as hollowed out as a dead man’s. One corner of his dirty, wrinkled shirt stuck out over his pants, and his suspenders drooped down around his thighs.