Read an Excerpt! THE GHOST DANCE JUDGEMENT by R.S. Belcher

In celebration of the publication of one of my favorite fantasy series, I’m happy to present an excerpt from Rod Belcher’s The Ghost Dance Judgement, book #4 in his Golgotha series, out now from Falstaff Books. Even though this is the fourth book, Rod assures me that it can be read as a standalone, so this is a perfect chance for you to jump in, especially if you have yet to discover the joys of Belcher’s books! I will be reading it very soon, so look for my review in the next few weeks. Enjoy!

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The Knight of Wands

It was close to sunup, and Jim Negrey could no longer keep hold of sleep. Jim had grown since his coming to Golgotha almost three years ago. When he had arrived in this town, he had been a scrawny, sunburned, half-dead, 15-year-old boy rescued from the heart of the 40-mile desert. Jim was 17 now with hair the color of sand and eyes the color of far-away oceans. He had grown a good foot in the last few years, and his chest had broadened, his voice deepened. He was still slender of build, but his work as a deputy sheriff in Golgotha had assured him of some new muscle and new scars.

Jim opened his eyes. The jade eye stared back at him from the night table. The eye was a sphere of milky glass. The dark circle inlaid within the eye looked back at Jim. Around the darkness was an iris of flawless jade. Jim knew that if the light hit that ring of jade at the right angle, a circle of tiny characters—Chinese, he had learned—would make themselves evident. The eye was his legacy. It had been his father’s, and Jim had reclaimed it from the men who had killed his Pa. Somehow, the eye had freed itself from the small, leather draw-string bag that Jim kept it in, and which he wore around his neck.

Jim began to sit up when an odd fluttering motion at the foot of the bed caught his attention. There was a creature perched along the iron bar at the foot of Jim’s bed. It was nude. It had the sleek, pale body of a woman but with talons like a bird’s in place of human feet and hands. Great wings of black, oily feathers, shimmering with a rainbow hue, grew from the woman’s back. The wings shuddered and moved nervously. The face of the woman was slender, almost gaunt, and delicate with long, raven-black hair that fell to cover her breasts. The eyes that regarded Jim had the glaring, pitiless, golden gaze of a bird.

“Death is circling in the 40-Mile,” the woman said. Her voice carried an odd accent that was familiar to Jim. He blinked and looked at her face again. She cocked her head at an odd angle and stared, unblinking, into the young man’s face. “My sisters are circling, waiting,” she said. “If you hurry, you can save them, save her. You must hurry, my sisters are hungry.”

“Miss Shelly?” Jim asked. “Is that you?” The face, the voice, belonged to Shelly Wollstonecraft, a local seamstress only arrived in Golgotha a little over a year ago. Golgotha’s resident taxidermist, and now, doctor, Clay Turlough, was sweet her. Miss Shelly was a slender, quiet young woman who spoke with a German accent. She had no claws, no wings or bird eyes, at least as far as he knew. In Golgotha, you could never be entirely sure.

“We come for everyone,” she said. “We came for your father, we came for your sister…”

“Lottie?” said his little sister’s name like a prayer. “You tellin’ me Lotie’s dead?”

Shelly, or the bird-thing with Shelly’s face, continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “And soon we come for him.”

“For who?” Jim was panicked now, struggling to rise from his bed, but he couldn’t. Shelly cocked her head again and opened her mouth wide, too wide for a human, and screeched, a chorus of dying doves. Her merciless golden eyes burned into him.

Jim opened his eyes and sat up in bed, the weight of dream off of him. The sky was slate outside his window. A single black feather drifted slowly down to light on the foot of his bed. No bird woman crouched there now, and the jade eye was safely in its pouch as it should be. He lay back and exhaled loudly, started to relax, and then recalled what Miss Shelly had said in the dream. Jim clamored out of bed. “The 40-Mile!” he said.

Jim splashed some water from a basin onto his face and slicked his hair back as best he could. He pulled on his denim work pants and boots quickly, hopping around the room a bit as he did, almost falling over a few times. He slipped the cord with the pouch that held the eye around his neck and buttoned up a white biled work shirt he removed from the basket of fresh laundry Constance had brought him a few days ago. Jim buckled on his gun belt. He took his Pa’s old .44 Colt from the night table. He broke open the gun’s breach and checked the loaded cylinder, just as he had before bed. Satisfied, he snapped the breach closed and holstered the gun.

Finally, he took the silver star from the bed table. He regarded his badge for a moment, polished it on his sleeve. It was real silver, an old Golgotha tradition, not some cheap tin badge like most lawmen wore. He recalled, as he did almost every time he put it on, the day Sheriff Jon Highfather had asked him to be a deputy. Every time he remembered, Jim smiled. He carefully pinned the star to his shirt and exited his room at Mrs. Schultz’s boarding house.

Jim made his way quietly down the stairs to the first floor. Normally, he pulled feet down the stairs, his boots rapidly thudding to wake the snakes, but at this hour, he’d catch Jesse if he woke up the other borders. He removed his heavy canvas coat and his hat from the pegs by the front door. He turned to unlock the door when a gravelly voice broke the silence.

“Where you sneaking off to ahead of the rooster, boy?” The voice came from the dining room. Jim walked in and found a lanky Indian sitting at the dinner table. The man’s face was shadowed with scars and pockmarks as well as several fresh cuts and bruises. He had a pointed nose that was crooked from having been broken on more than one occasion. His nose was currently bleeding. His dark eyebrows were thick, unruly, and met over the bridge of his nose. His black hair was long and looked a bit greasy. His eyes were dark, and the devil’s light danced in them. A silver star, twin to Jim’s, was pinned to his mud and blood-covered coat.

He grinned at Jim with yellow, crooked teeth but straight, sharp, prominent incisors. “You trying to suck up to the boss?” His people had never given him a name—as was their custom—so he had claimed one for himself from the hateful slurs of “half-breed” the white and Indian worlds had thrown at him. He took the insult and made it a personal joke at their expense. He called himself Mutt, and he was Jim’s best friend.

On the dinner table was a half-loaf of bread, a hunk of fresh cheese, and some of the scraps from the chicken Mrs. Schultz had prepared for dinner last night. Mutt was busily shoveling the food into his mouth. “’Cause I’ll tell you right now,” Mutt said, his mouth full, “no one likes a lickfinger.”

“You jist getting in?” Jim asked. Mutt nodded as he swallowed half a glass of water. Mutt’s blood was a drifting cloud in the water when he sat the glass down. “You okay?”

“Yep,” he said. “Turns out it was Yule Hawker that was tearing those cattle and cowpunchers in half.”

Jim sat at the table. “Well, cock my hat,” he said. “Old Yule?” Mutt’s grin grew, and he nodded. He started to cut himself hunks of bread and cheese with a huge Bowie knife he carried. He paused for a second and wiped the blade clean of bile-colored blood with his sleeve before he cut into the food.

“Sure ‘nough,” Mutt said. “Seems he got sold a talisman of some kind of critter called a Peluda by that French fella that had been passing through. Put a hex on him. When Yule’d get riled up enough, he’d get about as big as an ox, all hairy and ornery, and stronger than the stink on a shithouse in August.”

Jim absently picked at a scrap of the chicken and popped it in his mouth. “Don’t that beat the Dutch,” he said, reaching over and grabbing the loaf and tearing off a hunk of the bread. “What happened?”

“I gentled him down with a scatter gun,” Mutt said, “then we wrestled a spell. Turns out his tail was his weakness. I grabbed him by it, knotted it up, and broke that scatter gun over his head. Then I got the trinket off him, and everything was pretty quiet after that. He’s taking a nap in a cell right now. Tomorrow I’ll tell him he got a snootful, and I had to lock him up. He didn’t mean to hurt nobody. It wasn’t him, it was the thingamabob.”

“Where is it?” Jim asked. “The thingamabob?”

“Locked up in the vault with all the other junk that wanders through,” Mutt said and burped. “Remember that Green Ribbon Tong hatchetman that got his hands on those cloud-stepping sandals he stole from Ch’eng Huang?” Jim said as he wiped his mouth. Mutt snorted.

“I thought that ugly, damned flying Goatsucker thing was hard to catch.”

Jim laughed and poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher, “Or that Necklace of Harmonica…”

“Harmonia,” Mutt corrected him. Jim nodded around a long swallow of water.

“Right! That lady swindler, “The Countess,” had it and it made her young and beautiful forever, but it made everyone around her have awful accidents?”

“Yeah,” Mutt said, “I seem to recall Bick courted her for a spell even after we took that thing away from her.” Mutt burped again, stretched, and yawned. “So, I figure I earned my damn pay for the night. Kate was over at the jail when I dropped Yule off. Her and Jonathan dealt with some kind of living house over on Schultz Street today.

“Apparently some big shot from Washington D.C. showed up too. Probably means trouble brewing. Never met a politician that brought good news. Been a busy week. I told her I wouldn’t be in ’till late next year.” Jim chuckled. He picked off a corner of cheese and ate it. “So, that’s why I’m still moving about,” Mutt said, “what’s your excuse?”

Jim’s eyes suddenly got big as he remembered what he had been about. He jumped to his feet. “Aww darn it, Mutt, I plumb forgot! I think some people are in trouble out on the 40-mile. I was going to check it out.”

“What makes you think that?”

“A dream I had,” Jim said. “Woke me up. I think it’s the eye talking to me.”

Most of the townsfolk of Golgotha worked very hard to ignore or explain away the strange things and forces that visited their town. Most would have given the young deputy a dubious look or a concerned pat on the shoulder and tried to forget what he said, what it meant. Mutt didn’t blink at Jim’s statement of oracle in a dream. He stood up and brushed crumbs off his bloody shirt, grabbed his battered leather Stetson, which had a black feather tucked in the band.

“Sounds square,” Mutt said. “You get the horses saddled up over at Clay’s. I’ll clean all this up so Gillian doesn’t skin us both for muckin’ in the kitchen, change clothes and meet you there in a few.”

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The Ghost Dance Judgement is available now: Paperback/Kindle | Hardcover

R.S. (ROD) BELCHER is an award-winning newspaper and magazine editor and reporter.

Rod has been a private investigator, a DJ, a comic book store owner and has degrees in criminal law, psychology and justice and risk administration, from Virginia Commonwealth University.  He’s done Masters work in Forensic Science at The George Washington University, and worked  with the Occult Crime Taskforce for the Virginia General Assembly.

He lives in Roanoke Virginia with his children: Jonathan and Emily . Twitter | Website

Missed my reviews of the other books in this series? Check them out: The Six Gun Tarot | The Shotgun Arcana | The Queen of Swords