by Beverly Bird
“No, I’m all right.” She swallowed carefully and burrowed deeper into his arms. “Now.”
“Am I supposed to pull a handkerchief out or something here? I don’t have one.”
“I don’t need one.”
He thought about that a moment. “No. You don’t.”
His hard, strong hands wiped the tears from her cheeks and his mouth followed them, kissing the last traces of them away.
* * *
When he dropped her off at the clinic trailers, it took Catherine about thirty seconds to realize that he was going to leave again. His brows arched at the look on her face.
“Cat Eyes, there are about a hundred people on this Res right now who need a piece of me, and I’ve ignored them for a week.”
“I know.” And she had no desire to keep him from them. It was just...
She shook her head. She had talked and told him everything, and now the whole mess with Victor was over. Now she felt hollow and incomplete inside. She had been filled with that mess and now there was nothing to replace it, because she still didn’t know where he went when he left here. Jericho moved through her life like the wind, undeniably powerful yet leaving nothing of himself behind when he went.
She wanted to ask him what he had meant by we. She wanted to ask him about the bodyguards and why he had protected her so fiercely, ignoring his people for days to dig to the bottom of things with the FBI. She wanted to know and didn’t dare ask, because the wind couldn’t be chained. If she had not learned anything else in this land, she had learned that.
She finally shrugged and turned for the clinic steps. What difference did it make? Finally, painfully, she faced that one nagging truth she had not been able to cope with while she was in the hospital. She was a week away from the end of this externship. No matter what he wanted, what she wanted, she would have to leave and he would stay. She could not imagine him dwelling in any country other than this.
It sent such a pang through her she almost stumbled, but she reached the steps before he called her back.
“Forgot your coffee.”
She wheeled around and returned to the Rover as if he had her on a string and was simply reeling her in. She hated that and it made her voice sharp.
“Thanks again. For everything.” She snatched up the bag through the open passenger side window.
“See you tonight.”
She arched a brow in a look stolen directly from him. His smile was slow. It melted everything inside her.
“I’ll be back, Cat Eyes.”
She watched him drive off, then she finally went back to the clinic. She would put on a pot of this stuff, she decided. Then she would call Tufts and see when they were giving final exams. She’d intended to study hard while she was here, brushing up, trying to remember everything she had learned four long years ago. It would be incredibly difficult to pass those tests; she had known that from the start and knew, too, that she could do it if she tried hard enough. Maybe not the first time, but there was no law that said she couldn’t take the exams again and again until she got them right. She had brought all her old textbooks to pore over, had driven all the way back to Boston before flying to Albuquerque so that she could get them out of storage. Then she remembered that they were still in a box in the old brown Ford, which was lost somewhere in a wash.
“Damn it,” she exploded as she trotted up the steps. Then she stopped dead. The front room of the clinic was full of people.
She looked dumbly over her shoulder again, back outside. Ellen’s Toyota was squeezed between an old truck and an older convertible. Farther out on the desert, a horse, complete with saddle, grazed beside Bessie’s hobbled sheep. As odd as such traffic was around here, she still hadn’t noticed before, because she had been so preoccupied with Jericho.
Which said a lot for the way he had filled her heart and soul.
She whipped around to look inside again. Several pairs of black eyes gazed back at her quizzically. Most of them were children, but there was a man with his arm in a crude sling and Lance was there too.
Lance?
“Uh, Jericho just left,” she mumbled.
A few heads nodded mildly. One woman shrugged. Then Ellen came out of one of the back rooms, holding a syringe up to the overheard fluorescent light to check the dosage.
“Lance is first,” she said flatly. “Kolkline is on the phone. He okayed the vacs, but you need to talk to him about the antibiotic.”
“What antibiotic?”
“Lance got bit by a skunk up at the windmill.”
“Oh.” That explained the strange smell she had finally become aware of. She looked at Lance. He shrugged sheepishly. No one was sitting very close to him.
“Thought he was going to dig up my spare bottle,” he explained.
Of course, she thought, feeling a very dangerous, very wild laugh work its way up her throat. If she let it out now it would be so close to hysteria that she would send everybody running again. She grabbed the phone instead and talked briefly to Kolkline about the side effects of the antibiotic.
She motioned Lance into one of the rooms while she talked. Then she hung up and looked squarely at Ellen. The nurse’s eyes tried to slide away.
“Those kids by the door are next,” she muttered. “Same thing as Leo Coldwater. The school sent them home because their shots weren’t up to date. I guess they’re running through their files over there.”
“I see.”
“I’ll put them in a room and have them ready for you.” She handed her the antibiotic shot, but Catherine caught her arm when she would have turned away.
Not everything had changed. Ellen gave her a scathing look and shook her hand off. “Don’t touch me.”
“No problem. But will you at least tell me what’s going on here?”
The nurse didn’t answer.
“Is Jericho responsible for this?”
Finally, Ellen snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding. He doesn’t give much thought to the mechanics of things—like the fact that you’ve got to have something to do if you’re going to stay put here.”
“Stay...” Catherine was beginning to feel as dazed as she had before she came down with Tah honeesgai. “You’re responsible for this?”
Ellen’s eyes went hot and defiant, daring her to make something of it. Catherine did.
“Why?” she blurted, looking at the room again wildly.
“I don’t want you here. I don’t need you.” Then she hesitated. “But there are some things they won’t let me do, and you’re a little bit better than Kolkline. If you stay, maybe they’ll give him the boot back to Chicago or wherever it is he came from. And then there’s Jericho. I won’t see him destroyed again. I don’t know why he wants you, but if he does then you better plan on hanging around. I’ll be damned if I’m going to give you an easy way out.”
Catherine backed away from her. The pang she had felt in the parking lot had been bad. This one drove through her like a blade of ice.
Stay? Shadow had talked of it once, but it had never been a possibility. She had started realizing that in the hospital. She needed a residency in a real facility. She needed to earn a living. She had less than five hundred dollars left to her name!
And she couldn’t give up her career for a man again.
She felt sick, but she had given a lot of thought to Victor while she had been stuck in that bed, to Victor and their marriage and everything that had gone wrong. And she would die never knowing how she might have felt about him—how less torturous those years with him might have been—if he had not stolen her very spirit from her, if he hadn’t coerced her into giving up everything she had worked for, turning her into a life-sized Victorized doll.
What was it Uncle Ernie had said? Always listen to your spirit. You have found it, now you must use it.
This time she did laugh, a choked, bitter sound. She would have left Victor anyway, because of what he was, what he was capable of. And she knew she would love Jericho until the sun burned clear of the
sky. But she could not go back to being somebody’s doll. Their whole relationship had been built upon their mutual responsibilities in this clinic. Without those, she was a shell, empty, nothing...not the woman he had finally befriended at all.
She couldn’t do that. She needed to be something, to earn something for herself, even if it cost a piece of her heart that she would never get back again.
And she knew that would happen. God help her, but either way she would never be quite whole again. So what was she going to do?
“I’ll...I’ll see Lance now,” she said, because if she didn’t do something fast she would cry.
“He’ll need something to pack that bite with, too,” Ellen said tightly. “I’ll take care of that end of it. Bottlebrush works best.”
“Whatever,” Catherine murmured.
* * *
Jericho didn’t return until the night was at its deepest. Catherine had finally fallen asleep, curled up in bed while the single station on the television buzzed and spat at her with white noise.
At first she only stirred groggily at the thud of a vehicle door closing outside. Then her heart scrambled, as she recognized the sound for what it was. She sat bolt upright, fear an inherent part of her now.
Then she remembered. Victor was dead.
Still, the wolfman was presumably still alive, and pollen or no pollen she didn’t think it was wise to take chances at this hour of the night. She got up and went cautiously to the kitchen for Jericho’s gun, then she returned to the front window, keeping back from the glass, peering out.
The moon moved out from behind a rare cloud, spilling thin light down upon him. He stood beside his Rover, looking up pensively at the mountain.
She threw the door open and went out to meet him. “You could get yourself shot sneaking up on people at this hour.”
“You knew I was coming.” He looked at the gun in her hand. “Give me that thing.”
She handed it over and he unloaded it, pushing the bullets into his pocket and sticking it under his belt. “We’ve got to talk.”
Her heart leaped, even as she dreaded anything he might say now—dreaded it as much as she had once longed to hear any inconsequential little thing he cared to tell her. She looked down at her watch.
“Now?” she hedged. “It’s one o’clock in the morning.”
Jericho scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “Couldn’t get back any sooner. I had a lot to do. Come on, let’s sit over here.”
He led her to a low knoll beyond the parking area, sitting to face the mountain. Catherine remained standing, hugging herself.
“It’s cold,” she murmured. “Why don’t we go inside?”
“Because I think better out here. You can have my jacket.”
She finally sat beside him and snuggled beneath it. Her heart was banging hard again, but he didn’t say anything more. He just sat, staring up at the craggy peaks. There was snow at the very top.
“I live up there,” he said finally. “I guess I never told you that.”
A slow, warm peace began to seep through her, in spite of herself. “No,” she said quietly. “You didn’t.”
Where to start? he wondered grimly. There was so much to say. In barely a week, she would be leaving. He didn’t want her to go and knew she must; he needed her to come back and didn’t dare ask her to. He knew that in some poet’s mind somewhere there were the right words to say to make it happen. But they weren’t in his mind—he had always been a man of watchful silences and quick action when the situation demanded it. Words had never been something he had cared much for.
Then he thought of a way.
“I saw a wolfman once when I was a boy.”
Catherine straightened to look at him more closely. She didn’t know exactly what she had expected him to say, but it wasn’t that. Her skin prickled into gooseflesh even beneath his warm jacket.
“It happened at my outfit’s summer sheep camp when I was about twelve. Me and my buddies were in charge of herding the sheep and the horses. I woke up one night because the flock was bawling, and I went outside. My knees were knocking together and I damned near wet myself because I knew a man in the camp had just had a run-in with some stranger from another clan. That’s how it always starts. Strangers can be dangerous, especially if they’re wealthy and they have a lot of sheep. We’re taught from the cradle to take only what we need and to leave some behind for a man who might need it more. It’s the Navajo way, and anybody who disregards it is suspect.
“Anyway, the stranger this guy tangled with was rich. And the next thing any of us know, the sheep are carrying on. My buddies all came outside too and we all saw it—sort of a figure of a man creeping away from the camp through the camouflage of the flock. And then he just...grew. He mushroomed in size and his shoulders got sort of hunched over, and he flew out of there faster than any car or animal could run.”
He paused thoughtfully and Catherine waited, rapt.
“You’ve got to understand that I’d spent twelve years listening to stories about that stuff without really believing any of it—me and Shadow both. Kind of like the ghost stories you must have heard as a kid. Spooky and fun, but not real. We were educated at the public school in Gallup, not at any of the Res boarding schools. My family always felt that we had to be able to move pretty easily between the two worlds if we were going to survive, if we weren’t going to end up drinking from a bottle of Thunderbird at an old abandoned windmill because all the old ways were gone and we couldn’t accept new ones.”
He paused to rub his jaw again thoughtfully, but his eyes were still far away. “My point is that I was schooled enough in modern ways to try to consider more practical explanations for what I’d seen. Damn, I tried, but there weren’t any. Because when we woke up the next morning, the man who fought with that stranger was dead, right there in his brush shelter, cold as stone.”
Catherine gasped in spite of herself. “Was he old?”
His eyes came around to her. “No older than I am now.
“Things happen in this red-rock country, Cat Eyes. This land between the four Navajo mountains is sacred and old. Things happen here that can’t—don’t—happen anywhere else. If a person’s going to survive here, it has to be with a mind that’s as open and innocent as the sky.”
He wasn’t talking about wolfmen now. Another shiver whispered over her skin, both hot and cold.
“Whatever’s happening between us hasn’t been open.”
“No,” she managed.
“But I guess it’s about as basic as the air we breathe. Every beast and living thing shares it, instinctual and stronger than sense. Attraction, sex, just growing bigger and wilder sometimes until it becomes...”
She held her breath but he trailed off, and she wasn’t sure if she was relieved or sorry. Until it becomes what?
“Maybe it could endure,” he went on, “if we never took it out of here, if we never took it past this sacred ground into a world of concrete and bureaucracy and expectations. But you can’t do that, can you?”
She felt as if she were being strangled. She couldn’t answer.
“That’s about what I thought.” His voice held an almost metallic edge of pain, so jagged it cut her as well. “So where will you go?” he asked finally.
“Back to Boston,” she whispered. “I have to take some tests. After that...I just don’t know.”
“Maybe you’ll come back.” And in the end, he still couldn’t think of a better way to say it than that.
To what? she wondered wildly. “Do you want me to?”
He slanted her a wry look. “You know I do, Cat Eyes.”
Yes, she did after all. She felt it the way she had felt almost everything about him, the kind of man he was underneath all that early antagonism, the solid, strong goodness of his heart. She knew it the way she had come to love him without knowing anything about him, instinctively and with her soul.
“You said...” She paused to swallow carefully. “You said that mountain is sac
red.”
He looked up at it again pensively. “Yeah. It marks one of the boundaries of Dinetah, our land. We’re the only tribe in America that ever went to war with the white men and ended up with the same ground we started with. There’s a lot less of it than there was two hundred years ago, but we’ve still got the heart of it.”
“Then love me here, Jericho. Make love with me while it watches.”
His eyes came back to her, heating so fast, so strongly, it took her breath away. “I thought you were cold.”
“I won’t be.” She sighed roughly and looked up at the mountain. “Maybe something special will happen,” she whispered, “some magic, some miracle that can’t happen anywhere else.”
She pressed herself against him so quickly and quietly he never even sensed her moving. There was just enough moonlight for him to see her eyes before he lowered his mouth slowly to hers. He saw something there that made him ache. In that moment, she didn’t just believe. She wanted to believe, desperately, fervently, with a passion that hurt.
She wanted a miracle. She wanted a way to stay. There wasn’t one, but it was enough, more than he’d expected, more than he’d ever hoped to find. He covered her mouth with a groan, letting himself get lost in her again, refusing to accept that it could be the last time, because to think it would almost certainly make it so.
He slid his hands underneath his own jacket, then he laughed raggedly. No wonder she was cold. She wore a big, baggy T-shirt, but he realized for the first time that her legs were bare. When he had gotten here, she had been in bed, but he had wanted to sit outside, so she had.
She gave so easily; he thought he could understand how she had quit medical school for Victor. She gave of herself even as she elicited things from Jericho that he hadn’t thought himself able to give.
He lowered her to the ground and settled on top of her, trying to warm her, but she slid and twisted away from him.
“No,” she whispered.
Now what? But then he understood, and his mouth went dry. She tugged at his jeans and his shirt, and the gun spilled in the dirt.
“That damned thing...spends more time in the sand than we do.”