The Crossings

It’s the Arizona Territory, 1848 – the year the Mexican War ended. Fate and blazing pistols have just thrown together reporter and part-time drunk Marion T. Bell and the very nearly legendary mustang and scout John Charles Hart in the Little Fanny Saloon in the town of Gable’s Ferry. A rough place in a lawless era.

Then one night Hart, Bell, and easygoing giant Mother Knuckles stumble upon Elena, a fierce, young, badly wounded Mexican woman, near the banks of the Colorado. She tells them about the torment she and her sister have endured at the hands of las hermanas de lupo, the deadly Valenzura Sisters and their henchman, Paddy Ryan, at the well-manned slave-camp across the river, aptly called Garanta el Diablo – Mouth of the Devil.

It’s just three hundred years since Cortez. Only three hundred years since the Old Gods of Mexico were in their full and fearsome flower. Tezcatlipoca, god of the moon and the night. Tlazolteotl, Eater of Filth. Xipe, Lord of the Flayed. Blood for rain. Blood for bounty. For many, like the Valenzura Sisters, they have never died.

And Elena’s sisters’s still there.