by Beverly Bird
“There’s a start.”
He watched her for a moment, then turned and stalked out of the switchback. Shadow let out a deep, ragged sigh and found her toothbrush.
She took her time dressing. When she went back around into the main canyon, he was sitting at his fire, looking both hard and torn. Something painful moved in the region of her heart. She closed her eyes.
She couldn’t heal him, couldn’t save this one. She would only end up hurting herself. She had known that with startling clarity the moment he had said she should camp where she had spent the first two nights...close, but not too close.
She swallowed carefully and closed the last distance between them. She took his coffeepot off the little metal stand that held it over the flames.
“I’m not taking hundred-and-forty-year-old arrows to the cops,” she told him flatly. “If you want to try to convince them that there’s some mortal cause for what happened, then you do it.”
He wouldn’t look at her, but he surprised her by nodding. “Yeah, there are some holes in that approach.”
She sat down across from him. “Not the least of which is the fact that they’d chalk it all up to the legend. No one would come in here to investigate—not unless they’ve got a cop on the force who’s converted to Christianity. Even so, the stories of this place wouldn’t make it a high-priority case. You don’t necessarily have to fear chindis to worry that no one who has ever come in here has left alive.”
“You did,” he said pointedly.
“More than once,” she agreed. She nudged the arrows with her toe. “But there’s the proof that it doesn’t happen easily.”
He finally looked at her. His eyes were more dark gray than blue now, as impenetrable as the stone at all sides of them. “So then what do you suggest we do?”
“Nothing.”
His mouth twisted. “That’s not your style, Sergeant.”
She tried to shrug, but her heart wasn’t in it. “The legend’s been active for hundreds of years, since my ancestors’ time. I can’t totally disregard it.”
“You think some ghost did this?”
“I think it’s an unexplained phenomenon.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
He was getting angry again. She could feel it. The problem was, so was she.
“To use your phrase, I don’t give a tinker’s damn what you think. I’m not going to try to leave and put it to the test.”
“So you’re going to stay here forever?” he demanded incredulously.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet—except that I’m not going to fly out of here in a panic, only to discover that something won’t let me.”
He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “I don’t believe this,” he muttered.
“Fine. You try leaving.”
“I’ve got work to do.”
“Coincidentally, so do I.”
He looked at her narrowly. “You’re wasting your time and you know it.”
Shadow brought up her chin. “I was beginning to think so, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning maybe you’re responsible for those arrows. Maybe you thought you could scare me into running for my life, get me out of the way so you can do whatever it is you really want to do here.”
He leaned across the fire embers at her, deadly calm. Shadow fought the urge to cringe back.
“I was with you when those arrows started flying,” he said quietly. “As much as I’d like to take back that fact, I can’t.”
It hurt worse than she thought it would. She knew he regretted what had happened—what had almost happened—between them. And she told herself that she did, too. Yet hearing him say it was like a knife inside, slashing and deep.
“You were with me,” she agreed evenly, “but who’s to say you’re not working with someone?”
Mac very nearly choked. “You’re unbelievable, do you know that? And how do you suppose I got word to this accomplice? How do you suppose I told him that I was going to meet you in the canyon near the switchback at that particular time of night? Smoke signals, maybe?”
Shadow flushed. Her theory did reach.
He stood and stalked into his tent for his tools. When he came out he started for his dig, then turned back to her abruptly.
“There’s one other small detail you’re neglecting here, Sergeant.”
“Stop calling me that,” she said stiffly.
He ignored her, going on implacably. “I didn’t find you in the switchback.”
No. No, he hadn’t. She had been going to him, had met him halfway, driven by that strange, indefinable hunger that filled her even now as she watched him standing poised and ready for a fight, the sunlight teasing the gold in his dark hair. She closed her eyes because it was too easy to remember when she was looking at him, too easy to want again.
“You were headed for my tent, sweetheart,” he continued, and now the endearment sounded more like a curse. “You were coming to me. And there was no way in hell I could have told anybody that that was going to happen because I didn’t even expect it myself. There was no way I could have told anyone to lie in wait at that precise place instead of near your sleeping bag, where I was headed. And God help me, but at the time I really didn’t want to be interrupted.”
He went to the dig and she let him go. Her throat felt painfully tight with a million emotions. But finally the one that was first and foremost was fear.
She had been grasping at straws when she had tried to throw the blame at him. Because she really couldn’t deal with the alternative...that she was trapped here by some malicious legend, by an ancient chindi spirit, and she was scared senseless to try to leave and prove it didn’t exist.
Or worse still, maybe she just didn’t want to leave. Maybe, in full denial of all her better judgment, she was trying to give time the opportunity to bring them together again.
* * *
Several hours passed, and she didn’t appear at the dig. Mac was at the bottom of the midden, coming up with nothing but ageless rock and sand now. There was nowhere farther to go. Literally and figuratively, he thought, standing away from it and scowling.
He looked down toward the switchback. The next logical step would be to sort and label the few things he had taken out of here this morning and go on to the next ruins. It was distantly at an angle from the place where she had first been camping, hidden by the switchback outcropping from the place where she was now. Either way, he’d be working much closer to her.
Why the hell wouldn’t she move? he wondered. Why was she being so stubborn? She had to know she was putting herself in danger. But she wouldn’t leave and she wouldn’t move and now, apparently, she wouldn’t even visit his dig site.
He had hurt her.
He knew that and it made something writhe a little inside him. But he’d had no choice. He was the man he was, and he’d been honest about that long before he’d touched her. Honesty was the single unblemished thing he knew he was able to give anyone, and he had done it freely.
So now there was nowhere else to go. Nothing to do.
“Damn it.” Damn her. Damn the canyon and the arrows and the fool who had shot them. She had him so tangled up inside he hadn’t even given much thought to that yet; to who it had been and why anyone would want to do such a crazy thing. First things first. If she was going to get herself killed, then he had to make sure she didn’t do it on his conscience.
He left the dig and went down to the switchback. She was sitting on her sleeping bag, writing furiously in her notebook. His steps seemed to slow of their own accord as they carried him toward her.
“Hide it in the rocks,” he said. “Then when they find your body and scour the place for evidence, they’ll know to come looking for me. Is that the idea?”
Shadow jumped nearly out of her skin. She gasped, then pressed a hand to her heart. “You scared me. I didn’t hear you coming.”
“Then you ought to be thanking your Holy P
eople that it was me and not our prankster,” he said tightly. “What are you writing that’s more important than cataloging what I pull out of the ground?”
Shadow set the notebook aside. “I wanted to put down everything that happened last night while it was still fresh in my mind. When I finally get out of here, I might decide to take those arrows to the authorities after all.”
Mac stuck his hands in his pockets. Suddenly he wasn’t sure what else to do with them.
“Having second thoughts about leaving?” he asked finally.
“Not right now. But you were right. I can’t stay here forever. And I did consider hiding the notebook in the rocks, in case I don’t make it out alive.” Her faced paled ever so slightly as she said it, but her jaw was grim, her expression pragmatic.
“Great minds think alike.” He took his hands out of his pockets and crossed his arms over his chest instead.
Shadow hesitated. “I never really thought you were responsible.” Not for the arrows, at any rate, she told herself doggedly. Then she sighed aloud. The hell of it was, it was becoming almost impossible to convince herself that he had anything to do with the shard on the trail, either.
He had the sense that this was all backward, that he was the one who ought to be apologizing to her. “I know,” he said finally. “You’re not stupid.”
Her chin came up. Odd, but he took that as a sign that she had stopped being angry or hurt or whatever she was.
“Well, thanks for that, anyway,” she muttered stiffly. She got up and brushed off the seat of her shorts, then she finally met his eyes. “What are you doing here? Don’t you have work to do?”
“Yeah. I’ve finished the one dig. I’m about to move on to the next ruins.”
“So do it.”
“Move your campsite,” he said finally.
“Why? Worried about your conscience?”
She saw him flinch and was immediately sorry. Of course he was. What else could it be?
“Please,” he said, and she seriously thought the word would strangle him.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I can’t.”
“Why?” he demanded.
Because you’re starting to scare me worse than chindis.
“Because we were both moving down the canyon last night,” she answered simply.
She saw his eyes flare again. This time they didn’t close down quickly enough. She saw desire there, heat, wanting, awareness. Then he half turned away from her to run a hand through the top of his hair.
“All right,” he said. “Okay. Fair enough. We’re both a little vulnerable to—to each other. But that doesn’t make it sane to let this guy catch either one of us alone.”
“Something tells me you could handle him, alone or otherwise, chindi ghost or mortal.” She knew it was true as soon as she said it. She remembered the way he had half crouched down the previous night, putting her behind him, protecting her. The memory came to her clearly now even through the haze her terror had thrown over it. She swallowed carefully. She had let him do it. She was a woman who fought her own battles, and those of quite a few others as well. But she had let him do it.
“You can’t,” he said finally. “I would just feel better if I knew where you were.”
“You do.”
“I want to be able to see you, hear you. Damn it!” he snapped, turning suddenly back to her. “Call it my conscience, call it anything you want. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’ll move.”
It was a mistake. She knew it. It was just as dangerous as chindi legends, and they both knew that, but she turned away from him to start gathering up her stuff.
“Look,” he said roughly, “if you don’t want it to happen again and I don’t want it to happen again, then there’s no reason why it should.”
He wasn’t talking about the arrows. “That’s right,” she agreed.
“I’m thirty-seven years old,” he went on. “Not some kid with raging hormones.”
“I’m thirty. Old enough to know better.”
“Good. Then that’s that.” He moved to take some of her gear from her. “It was temporary insanity.”
“Moonlight madness.”
As they left the switchback, Shadow wondered who they were trying to convince.
Chapter 8
Mac helped her carry her stuff back to the old site, then he moved on to his new dig. After she was settled, Shadow took her notebook again and followed him.
She knew there would be nothing to write for a long time. It would probably take him days just to get through the top layers of sand and crumbled rock. And the apartments up on this cliff face were more extensive, wider. Mac made the same educated guess Shadow would have made as to where this midden was most likely to be, but there was always the possibility that he would dig for days and find nothing; that he would have to move a little farther along the canyon floor and start over.
Shadow watched him absently and found her mind wandering. Suddenly she straightened. “Mac.”
“What?” He threw a guarded glance at her. She was sitting Indian style on the ground this time. He wondered why she always wore her hair pulled back like that and answered his own question immediately. It was more practical.
And safer. He had, after all, buried his hands in it the first chance he’d gotten.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” she continued, “but neither of us thought to look up on the rim where the arrows came from. Did we?”
“What?” he asked again, still thinking about her hair.
“The rim,” she repeated. “Did you look up there?”
He stopped brushing sand away and settled back on his haunches. For a moment, he looked almost embarrassed.
“I didn’t check it,” he said finally.
“Me neither.”
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
“I’ll go. You have work to do.” She had noticed that he was limping a little on his sore leg, but she didn’t think male pride would allow him to take that for an excuse.
She pulled herself halfway up by the nearest handholds before she heard him behind her anyway. They reached the top and found exactly what she was afraid they would find.
Nothing.
She hugged herself against a chill, telling herself that the breeze made it just a little bit cooler up here than it was on the canyon floor.
“Maybe this wasn’t the place,” she mused.
Mac moved to peer over the rim. He studied the switchback and his tent.
“We were about right there,” he said, pointing. “And the arrows came from this side. You go right, I’ll take the left.”
They met back at the place they had started five minutes later. “Anything?” he asked.
This time Shadow shivered outright. “No.”
Mac shook his head and rubbed his jaw. “Not on my side either.”
“Maybe...” Her throat went dry and she had to force the words through it. “Maybe they didn’t come from up here at the top. Maybe they came from the cliff dwellings.”
“More than likely he erased his tracks,” Mac said flatly. “He wasn’t stupid. In fact, my guess is that he never meant to hit us at all. If he had been trying to kill us, the arrows would have come more slowly, would have been better aimed. Hell, two good shots could have killed each of us, and that would have been that.”
“We’ll never know,” she answered quietly. “If he used sagebrush or something to rub out his footprints, there’s no sign of it now. There was wind last night.”
“I know.” He had laid awake too damned long listening to it. “Look, it can’t possibly be an Anasazi ghost, because every time I’ve heard the legend that’s about the way it went—some pissed-off Old One still protecting his home against outsiders.”
Shadow nodded, wondering what he was getting at.
“Those relic arrows aren’t seven hundred years old, Sergeant.”
She hadn’t thoug
ht of that. It made her feel somewhat better, more in control. “That’s true.”
“Can I get back to work now?”
“I didn’t ask you to come up here in the first place.”
She had a point there, but he was still strangely reluctant to let her out of his sight. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that the arrows—and the legend itself—were nothing more than pranks. A ghost story had gotten started somewhere along the line, and some fool had decided to breathe a little extra life into it, tormenting the few people who ventured into this place.
“The arrows probably aren’t even a hundred years old,” he said, going down. “They were probably handmade to look that way.”
He got to the bottom and glanced up, shielding his eyes against the sun, making sure she climbed down this time rather than plummeted. He watched her legs stretch, her feet searching blindly for purchase in the rock. He looked away again quickly.
Too old for hormones.
She jumped down beside him. “If that’s what you believe, then why do you care where I camp?”
His eyes narrowed on her. “If you’re willing to accept that it’s not an Anasazi chindi, then why don’t you leave?” he countered.
“Maybe it’s a Navajo chindi. Maybe the legend got twisted somewhere along the line out of sheer repetition. Maybe the ghost is a lot younger.” And maybe I’m grasping at straws.
She sat down again to watch him work. There was yet another question, Mac thought, going back to the new dig, picking up his brush again. Why were they both so willing to do nothing about a prank that could have killed them? He found that he was no more eager to answer that one than he had been to go up to the rim and find that there was no real threat, no reason for her not to stay in the switchback, no real reason for her not to go home at all.
* * *
He worked late again without finding any trace of Anasazi habitation. It was half past nine before he finally straightened away from the dig, easing his sore leg carefully out of its bent position. Shadow was doodling in her notebook.
She hadn’t brought him dinner this time. The last little buck he had killed was long gone. He had the absurd sense that he had failed at some primitive role—that of feeding her, providing for her. He looked around at the rugged, uncivilized canyon. Maybe there were no chindis here, but it sure could do some odd things to a man’s mind.