by Beverly Bird
He knew she had brought her own food. She didn’t need him. No way in hell would Sergeant Shadow head off for a week in the wilderness without ample rations.
“I’m going to call it a night,” he said finally.
She looked up. “Okay.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
He switched off the floodlights and went to his tent. Shadow watched him disappear into the darkness, then she went to her sleeping bag. She had laid wood earlier. Now she lit it for her chindi fire, carefully sprinkling some sage around the outer perimeter of it. She had no doubt that it would keep ghosts away, but at least some small part of her wondered what affect it would have upon a more human intruder.
She fought the urge to dig the arrows out of her pile of supplies and look at them again. She found her little stash of chokecherries instead, and felt him watching her as she popped them one by one into her mouth, savoring them.
“What are you eating?” he called over.
“Berries.”
“Where’d you get them?”
“There’s a bunch of them growing in a ravine down past all the ruins.”
“When’d you find time to pick them?”
She finally looked his way. “This morning while you were still at the first dig.”
“And you’re just going to eat them plain?”
“Well, gee, I guess I just forgot to bring whipped cream.”
She couldn’t actually see him scowl through the darkness, not even with his own fire beginning to sputter and light. But she felt it, even across the ten yards or so that separated them.
“Bring them over here,” he said finally.
“Is that your way of asking me to share them?”
She thought she heard him curse. “It’s my way of saying I can stretch them and make a real meal out of them.”
Shadow was curious enough to take them over to him. She had collected them in one of her T-shirts and she handed the bundle over to him. But she found herself strangely reluctant—and afraid—to sit down and settle in at the fire with him.
Then again, this could take a while. She sat on the ground, keeping a careful distance between them.
Mac went into his tent and came out with some flour and a little metal tin. She pried the lid off it to peer inside and smelled animal tallow, probably left over from the deer.
“Go down to the stream and see if you can find some flat rocks,” he said. “About this big.” He demonstrated.
“Sure, Captain.”
He raised a brow at her but made no response. Shadow went to the stream and found the rocks he had asked for. When she came back he had mashed the berries, mixing them with the flour and a little bit of water.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Smear the fat on the rocks.”
She did.
“Lay them at the edges of the fire there so they get red-hot.”
She did that, too. He spread some of the batter on each one.
The goo cooked in no time at all. He used a stick to slide the rocks away from the fire again, let the stuff cool, then peeled a piece off and handed it to her.
Shadow ate cautiously and her eyes widened. “It’s delicious.” It was paper-thin, sweet with the berries, rich with the tallow. It melted on her tongue. She hadn’t expected anything so simple to be so good.
“It’s an old Hopi recipe. It varies with whatever you happen to have on hand at the time, but the heating method is the same.”
“A man who can cook,” Shadow murmured. “I’ll be darned.” She tried to picture him as a boy, learning the art, and failed miserably.
His gaze skimmed over her expression. “What’s the matter?”
“I can’t see you at your mother’s knee helping her to do something like this.”
His face hardened so abruptly, so completely, her stomach rolled. “That’s because it didn’t happen that way,” he said shortly. “My grandmother taught me.”
She nodded and swallowed. “What happened to your mother?”
“How come you decided you don’t want it to happen again?”
Shadow blinked at the way Mac steered the subject away so swiftly. It took her a moment to realize what he was talking about. Suddenly the cake seemed to stick to the roof of her mouth.
He needed to know. It had been bothering him all day. She had been willing enough last night before the arrows had come; had been hot and demanding in his arms. She had been as greedy as he had felt. Yet by midday she hadn’t wanted to camp anywhere near him. The more he thought about it, the more he considered it an extreme reaction from her, too emotional even if he had somehow hurt her by not wanting her in his tent or—God forbid—his sleeping bag, even if he already sensed she was the type who would want so much more than a man like him could give.
He watched her face. A lot of emotions played there, but the one that finally came out on top was a sadness that tightened something inside him with surprising force.
“Because I can’t save you without hurting myself,” she said finally.
“Save me?” he repeated, dumbfounded. “From what?”
“Yourself.”
“I don’t need saving.”
“You don’t think you do, and that’s my point.”
“I’m not following you.” And he found that he wanted to, very much. What crazy thing was going on in her mind now?
She put her cake down on her knee carefully. “I thought I could bring you some warmth for a while. But I was coming to you for myself, too. Because I needed something...something physical, something to make me feel like a woman again. I wanted to take something for me, finally.” She shrugged, trying unsuccessfully to make light of the whole thing. “Hey, it’s the nineties—I thought we could both get some satisfaction out of it and walk away feeling better.”
His eyes narrowed. “No, you didn’t. You’re not a nineties kind of woman.”
She wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or an insult. “Maybe not,” she allowed. “In the end I realized that I wouldn’t feel better for it. I’d lose something of myself into your darkness, and I wouldn’t be able to give you any light.”
“My darkness?”
“You’re complicated, Mac. You’re an emotional mess.”
His jaw dropped. He wasn’t sure anyone had ever put it quite like that before. “How so?”
You’re a man without a home, without a haven. “Every life needs an anchor. It’s only human.”
“I have an anchor.” He realized his voice sounded defensive, and he didn’t like it.
“What? Your work?”
“That’s right.”
“I rest my case. You give your best to dead pieces of the past that can’t give you anything in return.”
He frowned. “That’s more or less what you said about yourself,” he pointed out. “That you give all your best to other people and don’t get anything back.”
Shadow flinched. “But I have the good sense to realize it and try to figure out what to do about it.”
She made a move as if to stand. “Wait,” he said harshly. He wasn’t done with this conversation yet. Something she had said earlier came sneaking back at him, demanding that he examine it. “You said you wanted to take something for yourself finally. Just how long has it been since you’ve done that? In a—uh, physical sense, I mean?”
He watched her chin come up. “Seven years.”
“Seven years?” No, she definitely wasn’t a nineties woman, and she sure as hell wasn’t the kind of woman he needed. “What happened?” he demanded.
Shadow shrugged. “I left my husband in Santa Fe because I found I couldn’t survive away from the Res, from my home. But the Navajo way is uniquely hard on relationships. Strangers from other clans are to be avoided. People from within your own clan are considered kin. To become involved with one of them would be the same as incest. So.” She shrugged again deliberately. “It just happened. The years just passed.”
“You h
aven’t met anyone who struck your fancy?”
“I couldn’t allow my fancy to be struck,” she corrected. “And vice versa. Practically all the men I know are clan brothers.” She thought of Diamond Eddie. “Or strangers I wouldn’t give the time of day to, anyway.”
So she had run. Something had happened and she had realized she was traveling a road going nowhere...and she had run in panic, straight into his canyon, straight into his arms.
She would probably have gone to any man she happened to find here on her headlong flight, Mac thought. He wasn’t sure why that didn’t make him feel any better. He only knew that it was a very, very good thing that nothing had happened last night after all. Because she needed so much more than she knew.
“How about you?” she asked. “Why do you need so badly to be alone?”
“I always have been,” he answered, and that much was just about true. “It’s a way of life that suits me.”
“How long is always?”
He thought about it. “Since I was sixteen.”
“You never married?”
“No.”
Shadow scowled. That blew her wife theory right out of the water. Of course, even as she had hit upon it, it had felt...off. “So you’ve just been...wandering...for twenty-one years?”
Something about his shoulders was beginning to stiffen. He could ask hard, searching questions, she thought, but he didn’t like them asked of himself.
“I stay in some places longer than others,” he allowed finally.
“Like where?”
“I go back to the Yucatán whenever I get the chance.”
“What’s so great about the Yucatán?”
“A widow with fire in her eyes and plenty of tequila in her cupboard.”
Shadow fought the urge to wince. She wasn’t sure why that brought back the knife, slashing around inside her again. It was more or less what she had expected. “A widow who knows how to say goodbye,” she clarified softly.
“Who wants to say goodbye. To my knowledge, Regina’s been married six times. All of those husbands treated her badly. She’s just as glad to close her door at the end of the night and sleep alone now.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I don’t?”
“You’re not a woman who needs to be left alone. Only someone who’s been scarred can truly understand that need.”
“How do you know I haven’t been?” she asked, feeling almost defensive.
“Because you said you left your husband. Leaving doesn’t take a bite out of you the same way being left does. I’ve been left and I know better than to let it happen again. I’m not the man for you, Sergeant. You were right. I don’t have anything you need, anything that’ll make you feel good again.”
Who had left him? Shadow knew he wasn’t going to tell her. That would definitely be letting her get too close, closer even than sharing a tent against the threat of bogeymen.
She finally stood. “Thanks for the cake,” she said quietly.
She was giving him what he wanted, what he had always wanted. She was leaving. So why didn’t he feel better for it?
“No problem,” he said tightly.
“Sweet dreams.”
She went back to her own campsite. His fire was dying. He threw sand over the last of the embers and went inside.
For a long time he only stood there in the darkness. He wondered if he would sleep better if he laid down outside tonight. Anyone could sneak up on him when he was inside the canvas. He wouldn’t see them, wouldn’t even know they were coming until they were on top of him.
But who was going to come? An ancient, pissed-off chindi? Some warped prankster?
A woman with fire in her eyes, who really didn’t want to be left alone at the end of the night?
He pulled off his shorts and laid down on top of the sleeping bag, closing his eyes. It was good that they had talked, he decided. They understood each other now. There would be no more craziness about touching and loving. There would be no more groping each other in the darkness just because to do it and get it out of the way would mean neither of them would have to wonder about it anymore. It was the wrong thing to do, and they both accepted and agreed on that.
Now they could share her final days in the canyon as... friends. He wondered if he had ever really had one before. The Yucatán widow was probably as close to one as he knew, unless he counted the blind bum beneath the highway overpass in Phoenix.
Mac wondered what had happened to that old man. He was probably dead by now. He hadn’t thought about him in years.
The realization left him with an odd, sad feeling, almost a hollow sensation in the center of his gut. He pushed it away out of habit. For the next few days there would be Shadow, with her pertinent questions and her now-uncomplicated companionship.
They had disposed of the sex thing. Everything would be easy and fine from now on.
That was when he heard her scream.
Chapter 9
It was a curdling shriek, without end. It froze nearly every bodily function Mac had—his breath, his heart, even his saliva seemed to go dry for a moment. Then he was out of his tent and running.
There were no arrows. He looked around wildly, more than half expecting them. Shadow was sitting up in her sleeping bag with the same look that had been on her face last night, but this time she was pointing to the far canyon wall.
Mac looked that way and then he saw it. The moon was over the western rim. It was past full and shrinking again, but it still gave good light, enough light to cast shadows. And the shadow that was moving slowly across the eastern wall was that of...Kokopelli.
Mac’s thought processes staggered. He knew it couldn’t be, even as he knew what he was seeing. The figure was hunchbacked, stooped, grotesque, and it carried a flute at its mouth. From somewhere above the canyon rim came the reedy sound of its music.
Rage finally cleared his thinking. It was a hell of a good show, but chindis couldn’t play the flute.
“Stay put,” he growled at her. “Don’t move.”
There was only one way that anyone or anything could make a shadow at that particular spot—it would have to be standing between the moon and the eastern wall. Mac climbed up the western one, using the junipers, the craggy outcroppings, anything he could get his hands on to pull his way up. He felt the sting of blood on his palms and ignored it. From the top he could keep an eye on her, he thought, could make sure no one was sneaking back down there in her direction. And he could track the nut’s footsteps, because there was no wind tonight and even if he was obliterating them as he retreated, there would be some sign.
But there wasn’t. Mac reached the top and looked around, feeling dazed.
Slowly, shaken himself, he climbed back down to the canyon floor. He went to her sleeping bag, dropped down beside her and put a hand on her updrawn knee.
“It’s all right. Easy now.”
His assurances weren’t working this time. She was shaking so badly. He caught her fingers as they plucked at the sleeping bag bunched at her knees. Her hands were ice cold.
“I w-want...I need...”
“What? Tell me, sweetheart. Come on, talk to me.” She probably had some kind of Navajo medicine with her somewhere, he thought, something that would ward off the threat. If it made her feel better, he would find it. He would play the chindi game. He started to go to her small pile of possessions.
“No.” She wouldn’t let his hand go. “I need...you to hold me...please.”
Mac went still. Of all the things she might have asked him for, he wondered if there was anything more difficult for him to give her than that.
Friends, he thought again. From somewhere far back in his mind, he remembered the blind bum beneath a highway overpass holding him as he cried.
“Sure. All right. Come here. Scoot over.”
She came out of the sleeping bag, scrambling close to him. He closed his arms around her slowly, and then he closed his
eyes.
He was so steady and solid and real, she thought, just what she needed right now. Instinctively, she spread her hands against his back, rubbing them over his skin. She wanted to feel strength. She wanted to feel warmth. What she found instead were muscles tensed with desperate restraint. She snatched her hands back.
“I’m...all right now.” But she wasn’t. Every one of her senses felt exquisitely raw. The feel of him lingered on her palms. The scent of him filled her head, something clean and earthy that reminded her of rainwater and rock. His breath sounded unnaturally loud to her, almost ragged. And then there was his face, rough and wary, and those gray blue eyes in the moonlight, as warm as they were cold.
She hugged herself this time. “What...what was it?”
“I don’t know.”
Her eyes widened. “You went up there.”
“I didn’t find anything.”
“Nothing?”
His silence was so long it was an answer in itself. “I’ll look again in the morning.”
“That’s a long time away,” she whispered miserably.
In more ways than one, he thought.
He couldn’t stand being this near to her, and found he couldn’t bear to move away either. The sane thing to do would be to get up, tuck her in, go back and get his own sleeping bag and put it somewhere nearby...but not too nearby. Somewhere where she knew she’d be safe and he knew she’d be safe. Somewhere where he could watch that canyon rim while she slept.
That would be the sane thing, but he drew her head back down to his shoulder instead. For some reason, he needed the contact as much as she did.
“If we’re talking about ghosts here, then it’s two different ones—or something human and something not—or someone human who’s pretty damned clever. Those arrows are no older than nineteenth century—if that—and Kokopelli, if he ever really lived, was dead by the fourteenth at the latest.”
He felt her nod.