A Man Without Love

by Beverly Bird

  She pulled the desk chair over to the shelves and set to work. But before an hour had passed, a dull, throbbing headache started behind her eyes. She didn’t know what half this stuff was.

  She recognized the equipment and all of the drugs. But next to the suture material was a little unlabeled box of some powdery substance. In between some clamps and scalpels was a jar of dried weeds. She climbed up onto the chair to explore the top shelf. Nothing up there was identifiable.

  She opened a small cardboard box and gasped, pulling her hand back. It was full of dead birds. “Yuck.”

  “I warned you against things you don’t understand.”

  She wheeled around and nearly fell off the chair. Its seat swiveled dangerously. Jericho had come back. She looked past his shoulder. At least he was alone this time.

  “Why do you keep coming here?” she demanded. “Shadow didn’t say you worked for the service.”

  “I don’t. Get down from there before you break your neck.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Then get down before you stick your nose into something that’s none of your damned business.”

  That made her all the more determined to stay put. She forced herself to pick up the box of birds again. “What are these doing here?”

  “For Enemy Ways when the soul has been stricken by a wolfman’s spell. Or Ghost Ways when the spirit has been tainted by contact with the dead.”

  The dead? In spite of her best intentions, a cold shiver puckered her skin into gooseflesh.

  “That’s not...medicine,” she managed.

  “It is here.”

  His hand flashed out like a snake. Before she could even react, he snatched the box away from her. He grabbed her around the waist with his other arm, lifting her bodily off the chair.

  Fear made her heart cram its way into her throat. For a wild moment she was sure he would hurt her, but he only shoved at the chair with his boot.

  It careened toward the desk on its little wheels and cracked solidly into it. Catherine’s heart slid back to where it belonged, but then it began beating wildly. He did not let her go.

  She slid down his body until she was standing once more. Her first impression yesterday had been that he was cold and remote, but now she was aware of the heat of him. It touched her as palpably as the hard strength of his hand at her back, as the solid fit of his body against hers. It was angry and dangerous, passionate and strong—all of those things, and no single one of them.

  The fluorescent light over their heads turned his hair blue black; she found herself staring at a curl that brushed against his neck. More dark hair showed at the open collar of his shirt. He smelled of wood smoke and the outdoors, of something indescribably male.

  Her breath fell short. She took a quick, choppy step away, putting space between them.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she challenged.

  “What else do you want to know?” His voice was too quiet, as simmering as his eyes suddenly were. Had he spoken provocatively on purpose, or was that just his way?

  “What are you doing here?” she breathed.

  “People can find me here.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  He raised a brow at her sarcasm, even as he tried to keep his expression neutral. He didn’t want to wonder about her, but she made it impossible not to. He didn’t want to get lost in those wide, green eyes, and they were luring him in. He had known women with those fine, classic features before and he had long since curbed his taste for them. Yes, she had great legs, but so did hundreds of women who could embrace this land—his land—and thrive on it. He was damned if he was going to get sucked in by her type again.

  But even as he girded himself against it, Catherine shivered at his perusal. He saw it and bit back a curse. It had been one single shudder, nothing more, but he knew instinctively that it was not fear that sent it through her. It was expectancy, as though every muscle in her body was poised for him to reach out and touch her again.

  Arousal shot through him, hot and alive in spite of all his better judgment. Damn her.

  He turned away from her abruptly, even as a car door banged outside. Then she was back in his line of vision again, darting in front of him to look out the door, standing there in those snug-fitting jeans, her hands on her hips. Jericho kept a careful distance and looked over her shoulder.

  “It’s a patient,” she said, her voice faintly excited. Then she groaned. “Oh, God. We don’t have a doctor. I’m just an extern—I can’t do anything without a doctor. I can’t dispense medication without Kolkline’s approval, I can’t—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said flatly. “She’s looking for me.”

  Catherine spun back to him. “Why?” What in the world was going on here?

  He ignored her, stepping around her to greet the woman as she climbed laboriously up the steps. He helped her to the chair and Catherine backed away to give them room to maneuver. The woman looked older than the mountain, but although she leaned heavily on a cane she wasn’t frail at all. Her substantial girth spread the gathers of her voluminous traditional skirt. She wore a blue velveteen blouse and enough turquoise and silver to double her weight.

  “Grandmother Yellowhorse,” Jericho said warmly. Catherine’s jaw dropped at his tone.

  The woman was followed by a tall, lanky boy—apparently her driver, because he jangled a set of keys in his hand. He looked her way and Catherine smiled at him, but his gaze skipped over her.

  His eyes went to a point over her head, then slid to a place beyond her shoulder until he finally solved the problem of her presence by simply putting his back to her, shutting her out. Catherine felt temper and frustration build heat into the headache that lingered behind her eyes.

  “It’s Tommy.” The old woman sighed heavily. “He got into it with a stranger over Two Gray Hills way. Now he has dreams.”

  Jericho settled one hip on the desk beside her. “What kind?”

  “There are chindis in them.”

  “Just in his dreams?” Jericho asked. “He hasn’t seen any for real?”

  Grandmother Yellowhorse shook her head.

  “Were the chindis anyone he recognized? Kin or a stranger?”

  The old woman grunted. “If it was a stranger, I could maybe help him myself. No, it was his father. Kin is worse, isn’t it?”

  Jericho nodded thoughtfully.

  “Will it take a long sing to fix him?” she asked.

  “Three days, Grandmother. You know that.”

  “I’m a poor woman,” she grumbled.

  Suddenly Jericho grinned, and Catherine caught her breath. The smile transformed him. His face was no longer hard and angry, but strong and devastatingly handsome. He straightened away from the desk and Catherine’s eyes followed him, rapt.

  “And I,” he answered slowly, “am the president.”

  The boy laughed loudly. The old woman glared at him, then she looked accusingly at Jericho.

  “Now see what you do. You make my own nephew think I am foolish.”

  “Grandmother, I charge everybody the same thing. If they can pay me, they do. If they can’t, they do it later. You, on the other hand, are well known never to have given more than a dollar fifty for two buck’s worth of gasoline in your life. You have so many sheep you must worry that people talk about you.”

  “You show me no respect. I should tell this to your uncle.”

  “How is Uncle Ernie?”

  “Someone stole the table out of his hunting shed.”

  He laughed again. “I heard that.”

  He turned his back to her and winked at the boy. “I will sing for your son, Grandmother, for twenty-five of your sheep and seven hundred dollars. I think his father’s chindi might have been trying to warn him of something. Maybe the stranger at Two Gray Hills was a wolfman. I think we should do an Enemy Way to counteract any spells that might have been put upon him.”

  She grunted and heaved herself up from the chair. “You must thi
nk you’re as good as your uncle.”

  “I am, and Uncle Ernie doesn’t sing anymore.”

  “He’ll do it for me, for my Tommy.”

  “Maybe, but he’ll want the sheep, too. We want to send twenty of them to Angie Two Sons. Her husband died last year. You know she’s hungry. She has nothing.”

  Grandmother Yellowhorse scowled. “Okay. I’ll send Angie the sheep, but I’ll give you only three hundred dollars.”

  “Five.”

  Her mouth opened in a wide, nearly toothless grin. “You work too cheap, but it’s a deal.”

  She went back outside, cackling all the way. The boy looked at Jericho, shaking his head.

  “Why did you let her do that? You know she could have given you seven.”

  “But the standard rate for an Enemy Way is five.”

  The boy looked confused, then he laughed again. Catherine felt a strange hot-cold feeling work its way down her spine. She had to pull her own jaw shut deliberately.

  He had treated his sister with a certain warmth, but this was different, yet a new side of him. Among his own people he was still undeniably arrogant and very much in control. But he was kind, too. Whoever Angie Two Sons was, she had a staunch friend. And Jericho had taken care of her without once truly insulting the old woman whose reputation for thrift obviously preceded her. She watched him as he shrugged into the leather jacket he didn’t really need—it was still early autumn, and the day was dry and warm. But the garment seemed to be a part of him.

  “You can tell everybody I’ll be there Friday, early,” he told the boy. “I want to see Tommy first before we start.”

  “Okay.” The car horn began bleating repeatedly outside. “Gotta go.”

  He left, and Jericho started to follow him.

  “What’s a chindi?” Catherine asked.

  He turned back to her with a long, slow look. “What difference does it make? It’s not something you can fix, Cat Eyes.”

  “And you can? By singing some songs for him?”

  His eyes narrowed. “More or less.”

  “What kind of songs?”

  “Chants from our Origin Myth. We use different ones for different problems.”

  He closed the distance between them again slowly, almost lazily, except everything about him was too intense to be called lazy. His eyes bored down into hers, depthlessly black, steady enough to bring gooseflesh to her skin.

  “A chindi is a ghost,” he said. “The dead get up and go about their affairs at night. Sometimes they bother people, get into their dreams. Sometimes they go to their kin, trying to warn them of sickness, of their own imminent deaths. Or a wolfman can raise them and send them after someone he’s angry at, as a prelude to killing them, as a warning.”

  Catherine swallowed dryly, unable to look away from him. He was trying to spook her, and she was damned if she was going to let him succeed.

  “So Tommy is going to die,” she said nonchalantly.

  “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  He was serious. Or was he? Did he honestly believe in all this chindi stuff? She couldn’t be sure.

  “How can you stop it?”

  “By healing his spirit, where all illness starts. Did they teach you that in medical school?”

  “I...no.”

  “Of course not. That’s why the People don’t need you, Cat Eyes. That’s why they don’t look at you, why they don’t want you or Kolkline. They want their shamen, they want the chants and sings that are more ancient than the sky, the cures that have been healing the Navajo for centuries.”

  His voice was silky, his anger quietly volatile. It made something inside her tremble, and she knew it was best to just let him leave. Yet something in her persisted.

  “Are you one of those shamen?”

  His gaze moved over her face, and he nodded.

  Catherine felt her head swim. She had said it without really believing it. The term brought to mind a gnarly old man with wild gray hair and mystical eyes. It didn’t suit him at all...and yet it did.

  Looking at him, she realized that he certainly had the eyes.

  “Ellen, too?” she asked.

  He looked startled, and it broke the spell of the moment. He finally stepped back, away from her.

  “No,” he said, his voice flat now. “She’s a healer. She can treat various ailments with herbs. Medicine men are schooled by the elders in whatever sings they’re worthy of learning, and only sings can cure the spirit.”

  He was nearly to the door again. “How many are there?” she asked quickly. “Sings, I mean?”

  He answered without looking back at her. “Over fifty. Some are so ancient they died with our ancestors when the old ones found no one to pass them on to. Others are remembered by only one or two elders on the whole reservation. No shaman knows more than half a dozen of them.”

  “How many do you do?”

  “Three.”

  He picked up the box of birds. She understood now. They were his. She felt a silly, almost superstitious dread at having tampered with them.

  She opened her mouth to apologize, but he had already left. He slammed the door hard behind him.

  Chapter 4

  Dr. Kolkline did not make an appearance the next day, nor the day after that. Three patients came in, all of them looking for Ellen. The nurse sold them an odd collection of herbs from an odd collection of jars. Catherine wondered a little giddily what her professors would have thought of such methods of treatments.

  She had never felt so useless in her life.

  She sat behind the desk and tried to rub the ever-present headache out from behind her eyes. Not only wasn’t she learning anything here, she thought, but she wasn’t earning her keep either. Granted, the post didn’t pay anything, but her room and board were free and she felt as if she ought to do something to deserve them. She tried to tell herself that it was enough that she was safe...but it wasn’t. She was frustrated, angry and bored to tears.

  She was also spoiling for a fight.

  She watched Ellen lock up a jar of brittle dried leaves in a glass case that held some of the more dangerous drugs.

  “What’s that?” she asked, knowing she was not going to get an answer. “You know—” she continued on in the silence “—there’s probably some legal ramifications to dispensing that stuff from what’s essentially a government facility.”

  That got a reaction. Ellen paused as she unzipped her white jacket and hung it neatly on the coat tree.

  “It’s essentially a legal substance,” she snapped. “It grows all over the desert. I just cure it and tell people what to do with it.”

  “Then why won’t you tell me what it is?”

  “Because I don’t need your medical opinions. I had my fill of them in nursing school.”

  Her color was high as she left, stomping heavily down the steps. Catherine sighed and leaned back in her chair. She wasn’t going to be able to stand six weeks of this.

  She pushed to her feet as footsteps sounded outside again. She looked up, expecting that Ellen had forgotten something, or maybe she just wanted to remind her again how unwanted and unnecessary she was here. Instead, she found herself looking into Jericho’s dark, watchful eyes.

  He hesitated, almost as though he was startled to see her. “Thought you’d be heading home by now.”

  “Sure. I have such a long commute.”

  The corner of his mouth moved again in that reflex that almost wanted to curl into a smile. Then he turned away from her as another man shuffled in behind him. The man moved slowly, his head down, moaning quietly to himself.

  “Sit yourself down, Lance, and I’ll fix you up.”

  He went to the shelves, spilling a couple of pills into his left hand. He took a jar of dried leaves with the other and Catherine’s heart punched hard against her ribs.

  “You can’t do that,” she blurted.

  He stopped cold to look at her. “Come again?”

  “I said...you can’t do t
hat.” Everything about him warned her to back off. But she couldn’t. What he was obviously going to do was morally, legally wrong. Ellen, at least, had a nursing degree, but suddenly Catherine couldn’t watch any more of this slaphappy disregard for the rules that governed medicine and protected patients.

  “Look,” she said carefully, “I understand that you’re a...a shaman, and I’m sure you’re very good at what you do. And I don’t mean to interfere, but—”

  “Then don’t.”

  “You have no license to give medication to anyone!”

  His anger came off him in waves. Once again, she could physically feel the heat of him. He closed the distance between them and she stepped back warily, but he only responded in short, clipped tones.

  “This—” he held up his left hand “—is aspirin. And this—” he held up the jar “—is prairie clover root.”

  “I...oh.” She flushed.

  “Guess I don’t need much of a license to give him either one, do I?”

  He turned back to Lance, pouring a little of the root into the man’s waiting palm. “You know the routine, old friend. Boil the root and drink down the aspirin with it.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Catherine ventured.

  “Headache,” the man groaned. He wasn’t actually answering her; it was more like a general complaint. He got up again and shuffled off toward the door, clutching the weed.

  “Wait!” Catherine cried.

  His feet went still. Jericho’s gaze came around to her again warningly.

  “At least let me take his vital signs. My God, you didn’t even examine him! Any number of things could cause head pain, especially if it’s recurring. Are his eyes dilated? Are there any other symptoms?” She yanked open a desk drawer and grabbed a stethoscope. “It could even be that Mystery Disease,” she went on, “and you’re going to send him away with aspirin and some dried grass!”

  “It’s not Tah honeesgai,” Jericho said flatly.

  Catherine scowled. “Tah-what?”

  “Tah honeesgai. What the Navajo call your Mystery Disease. It means ‘illness that our medicine cannot cure’. And Lance doesn’t have it.”