But she couldn’t have dreamed Jesse. He had been so real. His kisses. His smile. His love.
Tears rose in her eyes. She dug in her pocket for a tissue, found none and wiped her arm across her face.
“Hey,” Jack said, “nice!”
She blinked. “What?”
“Never noticed that before.” She looked at him blankly. “The bracelet. Must be a few hundred years old. Didja get it in Bozeman?”
Sienna looked at the beautiful bracelet that encircled her wrist. Horsehair. Sterling silver. Pipestone.
“Jesse,” she whispered.
Her heart filled with joy. What had happened had been real—but it was over. She had lost Jesse, she would never lie in his arms again.
Burying her face in her hands, she began to weep.
“What?” Jack said, but she didn’t even try to answer.
After a while, they all walked away. Trauma, she heard one of them say. Stress.
Let them think what they wished. There was no possible way to explain what had happened…
Or to explain her broken heart.
Time slipped past.
It didn’t rush backward or gallop relentlessly forward. No holes swallowed Jesse up. Time just kept moving, and so did he.
He spent days searching the canyon, the mountain, every inch of his land, looking for Sienna, even though he damned well knew he wouldn’t find her.
Something had torn her from his arms. Something more powerful than any enemy he’d ever encountered. This was an enemy he could not see, could not describe, could not touch.
Could not defeat.
The realization half-killed him.
His woman was gone. God only knew where she was, and he—he was helpless to find her.
His men treated him with caution. They thought Sienna had left him. He didn’t try to explain. How could he? He couldn’t explain it to himself.
When he ran out of places to search, he flew to San Francisco, to New York, to half a dozen universities where scholars knew all there was to know about astronomy and time and physics. When he ran out of universities, he walked the streets of dangerous neighborhoods, sat through the nonsense of séances and tarot-card readings. He was willing to try anything, everything.
It did no good.
Sienna was gone.
It was his fault.
If only he hadn’t brought her to the canyon…
He tried not to waste time on self-pity. All he wanted was to figure out what had happened, come up with a way to find his Sienna and bring her back.
Was she in her own time again? Maybe. He tore up the sale papers for his land, had his bewildered attorney draw up documents that would instead protect it forever.
Maybe she would know about it.
It was like putting a message in a bottle and tossing into a vast, uncharted sea, but it was, at least, something.
And, finally, when there was nothing else left, he buried himself in work. He sweated and toiled alongside his men, rebuilding fences, herding, branding, doing whatever he could to keep from thinking of what had been taken from him forever, what he would never find again.
Days became weeks, weeks became months. The heat of summer gave way to the chill of autumn. Winter was fast approaching. The weather, like Jesse’s heart, was cold and bitter.
Nights were the worst. You couldn’t do much on a ranch once darkness settled over it. He took to going through the old books and papers his father had collected.
Maybe, just maybe, he might discover something in them that would help him understand what had happened.
The books were full of legends. The papers were mostly notes that spoke of things Jesse no longer believed but could not so easily dismiss, not after what had happened to him and the woman he loved.
Then, one night, he stumbled across a map. It was old, older than the bracelet he’d given Sienna; it had been drawn on a piece of tanned deerskin. It took less than a minute to see what it depicted: the canyon, the ledge, the sacred stone.
A sheet of paper was clipped to it. Jesse recognized his father’s handwriting.
The old ones believed the passageway above the sacred stone was more than an entrance for the summer sun. Some believed it was a portal between worlds, that when proper conditions existed, one could travel through time.
Jesse’s heart began to race. He sat down at his desk and read the rest. At first, the words erased any faint hope he might have harbored. Some ancients had apparently gone through the opening between the stones to another time. None had ever come back.
But every four hundred years, his father had written, there would be a very special summer solstice. It was said that on that day, one chosen by fate could slip through the opening. The portal would remain open until the sun could no longer climb to the top of Blackwolf Mountain. Then, months later, at the moment when the shortest day became the longest night, it would close and remain closed until the four-hundred-year cycle repeated.
The moment when the shortest day became the longest night. When the shortest period of daylight became the longest period of darkness.
The winter solstice.
“The winter solstice,” Jesse said, and leaped to his feet.
Today was December 22. The winter solstice would happen today. Or tonight. Who knew what you called that precise instant that marked the dividing line between the shortest number of daylight hours and the longest time of darkness? All that mattered was that the winter solstice was coming, and yes, all this old stuff was rubbish…
Except, maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe it was real. Hell, of course it was real. How else could Sienna have come to him? She had been the one chosen by fate to slip through time. He had no idea why, didn’t give a damn why…
He only knew that it had happened.
Could that honor somehow now fall to him?
What could he lose by trying?
“Nothing,” he said into the silence of the room. Nothing, when he had already lost the only woman he would ever love.
He looked at his watch. It was already going on eleven. It sounded like a bad joke, but he was running out of time.
What did a man take when he hoped to travel through time? He grabbed his wallet, ran for the door, stopped, went back and scooped up the envelope confirming his ownership of Microsoft stock that had come in the day’s mail, stuffed everything into the pocket of the denim jacket he grabbed from a hook in the mudroom. He headed for the barn. The Silverado would be faster but instinct told him a horse, not a truck, was the right choice for what would surely be the most important ride of his life.
He didn’t bother saddling Cloud, simply slipped on the stallion’s bridle, then jumped on his back and leaned over the proud, arched neck.
“Go, boy,” he whispered. The horse seemed to sense his urgency. Cloud tore over the land, across a thin layer of icy snow, the frigid wind blowing in Jesse’s face.
But he’d made a mistake. Riding the stallion had seemed right, but even Cloud’s great speed had not been enough. By the time they reached the canyon, the demarcation between autumn and winter was less than two minutes away.
Jesse slid from the horse’s back and ran toward Blackwolf Mountain, looming high above him. He looked up at it; the darkness was so deep he couldn’t see the ledge. He couldn’t see anything, not the stones, not the handholds he’d need.
“Sienna,” he said, his voice rising into the silence of the night like a prayer. “Sienna, I love you, sweetheart! Sienna!”
All at once, thunder roared eerily overhead. Echoed over the mountain. Lightning, green as an emerald’s heart, sizzled through the black winter sky.
Jesse flung back his head, threw up his arms.
“The old ways can never die as long as they live in your heart,” he cried. “I was too foolish to see that until now!”
The lightning struck. He felt as if his soul were on fire.
“Sienna,” he whispered.
The lightning struck again and he fell, unconscious, to t
he ground.
Sienna had vowed never to return to Blackwolf Canyon.
It held too many memories that broke her heart.
She’d buried herself in work, going on digs in Mexico and in Belize. She’d explored sites no one had seen in thousands of years, unearthed pottery that now was on exhibit in the great American Museum of Natural History in New York. She’d written endless papers. She had her doctorate.
But nothing would ever fill the void in her heart.
She lived in Manhattan now, in a small apartment near the museum. And dreamed, every night, of Jesse, awakening each morning with her pillow damp with tears.
But this morning was different.
She awoke very early, and with a sense of anticipation. It made no sense. This would be a day like any other. She’d work all day, come home to an empty apartment and tumble into bed, exhausted, to dream again of all she had lost.
The only thing different was that this was the morning of the winter solstice.
“So what?” she said into the silence.
The answer came with stunning speed.
Sienna. You must be in Blackwolf Canyon at midnight tonight.
Wonderful. Now there were voices in her head.
It was crazy and she wasn’t going to do it. Hadn’t she vowed she would never go back? But the voice inside her was persistent, and finally she stopped trying to figure out if maybe, this time, she actually was going crazy. There was only one way to find out.
She rushed to Kennedy airport, went to the American Airlines ticket counter and said she had to be in Bozeman, Montana, by evening.
There was one ticket available; it took her to Denver, where she changed planes. Once in Bozeman, she rented a Jeep, drove like a madwoman across the wild, empty land with Blackwolf Mountain on the horizon first as a speck, then a dot, then as a towering presence.
When she finally drove into the canyon, it was eleven o’clock. She put her foot down on the gas pedal until the Jeep was damned near airborne.
She had to reach the mountain, reach the ledge; she had to be there when the shortest daylight hours of the year became the longest hours of darkness even though she didn’t know why….
And, God, she wasn’t going to make it. The dashboard clock read three minutes to midnight.
“Come on,” Sienna said, her voice shaking, “come on, come on, come—”
Thunder roared overhead. She cried out; the Jeep skidded on the icy grass as the thunder roared again. There it was. The mountain, a dark, menacing hulk straight ahead.
Lightning, green lightning, slashed the sky.
Sienna stood on the brakes. Flung open the door. Her lips were moving in silent prayer. She didn’t know what it was, what she was saying, only that she wanted the green lightning to strike again, to hit her squarely as she raised her face and arms to the sky.
It struck.
Not her.
It struck all around her and she screamed as the world tilted….
“Sienna?”
Her heart stood still. That voice. That beloved voice, husky and deep and so wonderfully, magnificently familiar.
The sky lightened. The moon appeared. The stars, a billion of them, blazed down on Blackwolf Canyon….
“Sienna,” Jesse said, and when she spun around she saw him running toward her, arms open and waiting.
“Jesse? Oh, God, Jesse!”
She flew into his embrace, weeping, sobbing, tasting the salt of their commingled tears as they kissed. He held her that way for a long, long time and then, at last, she drew back and looked up into his beautiful face.
“How?” she whispered.
He shook his head. “I found something my father had written. And I knew, I just knew it meant I could find you.” He lifted her off her feet. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face against his throat. “Never leave me again,” he said fiercely.
“Never. Never, never, never…”
He kissed her. She clung to him. Suddenly, a big, velvet muzzle intruded between them.
“Cloud,” Jesse said, and laughed. The stallion whinnied; gently, Jesse pushed him away. “I love you, Sienna,” he said softly. “I always will.”
“Until the end of time,” she whispered.
“Until the end of time,” he echoed, because as long as he had this woman in his arms, time had no end. The year, the place didn’t matter.
Jesse Blackwolf was, at long last, home.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-5501-6
BLACKWOLF’S REDEMPTION
First North American Publication 2010.
Copyright © 2010 by Sandra Myles.
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