Page 41 of Runaway Hucow

“Good!” Roscoe snapped, pushing Spike’s hand away. “She ought to be fucking scared of me! Everyone fucking ought to be!”

“And you ought to watch your language around a lady.”

Roscoe scoffed. “A lady? More like a harlot from the looks of it.” He cut his eyes at the hucow. She’d managed to get her shirt on, but she hadn’t buttoned it yet, and her enormous breasts were bouncing wildly as she struggled to pull on her jeans. Her face was as red as the evening sun. “We eat off that table, you know.”

“Hey!” Spike shouted, giving him a hard shove. “Don’t you say that! Tess is no harlot!”

Roscoe redirected his rage toward his brother. He was a better target for it. The hucow might not have been a lady, but she was a female—that much was more than apparent—and Roscoe wasn’t about to get physical with a female.

He could get physical with his brother though. He could do that.

Roscoe gave Spike a double-handed shove that sent him reeling backward into the wall. The whole house shook with the impact.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Roscoe shouted.

Spike had recovered from the shove, and his muscles tensed. For a second, Roscoe thought the crazy, naked bastard was actually going to charge him, right here in the middle of the house. Roscoe shifted his hooves into a fighting stance.

“I went to Crooked Valley,” Spike said. “That’s where I found Tess. She needed help, so I brought her back here.”

Roscoe already knew that. Most of it, anyway. Peyton might have been the smart one of the family, and Spike might have been the best shot, but Roscoe was the best tracker. A few days ago, he had set out looking for his missing brother, and he’d followed the trail northeast to the town of Crooked Valley, a vile place full of nasty little humans. Roscoe knew there was only one reason his brother would go to a place such as that—to bag himself a hucow.

It was Chase who had found the dead bounty hunters. Three of them. The harpies hadn’t left much besides bones, but that was still enough for Roscoe to recognize the work of his brother’s 4 gauge. The one man’s head had been so thoroughly blown to bits that there was barely anything left of his skull. He guessed those three new horses out in the corral must have belonged to the men too.

“Kidnapping. Murder. Horse thieving. Do you realize what you’ve done, Spike? You’ve put the valley at risk by bringing that hucow here. You’ve put the herd at risk. Everything we’ve spent our whole lives working for.”

“Tess needed my help. I couldn’t just abandon a hucow in need.”

“Yes you could have. And you’re going to. We’re going to take that hucow right now, ride her off into the prairie somewhere, and turn her loose to fend for herself.”

“The hell we will.”

“Spike, she’s a runaway hucow. There’s a price on her head. Men will come looking for her. Bounty hunters. Those three you blasted back there by that stream were just the tip of the iceberg. They’re going to scour the countryside until they find her, and sooner or later somebody’s going to find out about this valley and the herd. What do you think will happen then? We have to keep this valley a secret, Spike. We have to protect the herd!”

“To hell with the herd.”

Roscoe froze as if he’d been shot. For a long moment, he just stood there, gaping in disbelief at what his brother had just said. Then, in a rush, the rage came surging back into him until he could feel it tingling in the very tips of his horns.

“Outside,” he growled. “Now.”

He turned and stalked out the still-open door. Chase fluttered after him. The eagle perched itself atop his right shoulder until they were clear of the porch, then launched into the air and glided out over the prairie in search of something to eat. It was evening now, and the low sun was painting everything a deep, bloody red. Or maybe it was just Roscoe’s temper that was doing that. He could hear Spike’s hooves clomping down the steps behind him.

Neither one of them spoke. They didn’t have to. They both knew the drill by now. Roscoe went left, and Spike went right. When they’d both gone twenty paces, they turned to face each other across the trampled grass of the door yard.

“What are they doing?” the hucow was asking. She and Peyton had both finally gotten their clothes on, and they had come out on the porch to watch.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” Peyton told her. “They do this all the time. Best to just stay out of the way and let them get it out of their systems.”

Roscoe blocked them out and focused on Spike. “Ready?” he called.

Spike didn’t answer. He just lowered his body into a charging stance and pawed the ground with one hoof. The crazy bastard hadn’t even bothered to put his clothes on for the fight.

It wouldn’t be the first time Roscoe and his brother had fought. Ever since Spike’s horns had first come in, he’d been challenging him on a regular basis. In those early days, Roscoe had taken it easy on his little brother, but in recent years it had been getting harder. Roscoe still outmassed Spike by a good bit, and he had no doubt that he would best his little brother in combat, but only if he gave it everything he had.

Roscoe stared at his brother a moment longer, then he charged. Spike began charging at almost the same moment. Their hooves shook the ground. Within a second, they had closed half the distance between them. On the porch, the little hucow was screaming.

Their skulls came together with a crack, and for a moment, Roscoe’s consciousness blanked in a white flash of pain. When his senses came back to him, he saw that he had driven Spike back a few yards.

“That’s one for me,” Roscoe said.