Stormwalker

by Dallas Schulze

  "I've always loved storms," he murmured against her hair. "I was born in the middle of the worst blizzard anyone had seen in years. And I took my first steps during a summer thundershower."

  "Where were you born?" Sara asked. His husky voice served to block out thoughts of nature's display outside, and Sara didn't want him to stop talking.

  "Cody, Wyoming."

  "Is that where you got your name?"

  "Uh-huh." His lips teased at the soft curls near her temple.

  "What about Wolf? Where does that come from?"

  "My great-grandfather was named Brother-to-the-Wolf. As the old traditions died out, my grandfather took the name Wolf."

  "So you don't have a tribal name?"

  "Not officially. My grandfather didn't want me to lose touch completely with the old ways. He gave me the name Stormwalker when I was a boy. He said it could be my private name." He drew his head back, looking down at her intently. "There are people who feelthat the giving of a name is giving a piece of yourself, opening the way for evil spirits, unless the other person has something to give in return."

  Sara shook her head uncertainly. "I don't have anything to offer. I'm afraid I can't give you a secret name. All I have is myself,"

  "Can you offer me that?" His mouth smiled, but something flickered in the back of his eyes, giving the lie to that smile. Beneath her palm, she could feel the steady thud of his heart. Could she offer him herself? It was something she'd given to no one.

  "I'm all yours," she whispered. His smile faded. This was too dangerous. Why had he told her his name? Why had he asked her for something in return? The game was too serious. It cut too close to the bone, threatening to reveal things he didn't want to see.

  His arms tightened for a moment and then he dropped a kiss on her forehead and rolled away, letting the cold air sweep across her naked body. The chill Sara felt was more than physical, but there was a twinge of relief that went with it. They'd been too close to taking steps neither of them was prepared for.

  He stood up, stretching. "The fire is about to go out, and this sleeping bag isn't big enough for two."

  Sara watched sleepily as he knelt in front of the fire. The flames cast golden highlights over the copper of his skin, catching in the thick blackness of his hair. He looked like a Remington statue cast in bronze.

  He fed the fire, coaxing the flickering flames to life. One of the horses snorted, and he moved to the back of the cavern to lay a soothing hand on the animal's neck, murmuring quietly. He was totally unself-conscious about his nudity. He wasn't flaunting his body. At this moment, in this setting, clothes would have been an intrusion, and he wore his own skin with a grace that few men could manage in designer originals.

  Sara had to drag her eyes from the masculine beauty of him. He was right. One sleeping bag was not going to do for both of them. But they could zip both bags together and come up with a comfortable bed.

  A few minutes later she was snuggled firmly against Cody's side. Physically they were close, but there was a subtle mental distance between them. Each had retreated from the other, giving them the space they needed to deal with the sudden changes in their relationship.

  They fell asleep without speaking again. Making love had been inevitable. Now that it had happened, it was easy to see how they'd been struggling against it from the beginning. It wasn't possible to regret the step they had taken, but the change was too drastic for either of them to be able to predict the direction in which it might lead them.

  The sleet continued to fall, but Sara forced herself to stop thinking about what might be happening with Cullen. The high country had already seen several snowstorms. It wasn't as if this weather would catch him unexpectedly. The best thing she could do for him was to get some sleep so that they could start first thing in the morning.

  Cody listened to her breathing grow more shallow and steady, and his arm tightened around her. One slender hand lay against his chest, just over his heart, and he fought the urge to move it, his mouth twisting ruefully. The symbolism was irresistible. But moving her hand wasn't going to save his heart. He had the feeling that it was already cupped in her small palm.

  He forced the thought away, making his mind a careful blank. He didn't want to analyze anything tonight. All he wanted was sleep. Perhaps with her at last beside him, the dreams would leave him alone and he could sleep through the night without being haunted by her eyes.

  He'd been asleep for some time when the dream came to him. His brows hooked together in silent protest, but he was swept up in the dream pattern. Floating on invisible wings, he looked down on the crash. The plane was a twisted mass of silver and red. Red for blood. But the only wound he could see was the path the plane had gouged out of the land. And this time he could feel pain. Tamped down but vivid. And then that was gone. Swallowed in death? He twisted in protest, fighting the hold of the dream. Not again. He couldn't go through this again. But the dream held him tightly, pulling him, drawing on all his senses until he could have taken the path to the crash with his eyes closed. This was a place to which he had to go. Something he had to do.

  And then it was gone as suddenly as it had come. He woke abruptly, a sense of urgency still clinging to him. Beneath the weight of the sleeping bag, his skin was bathed in a film of cold sweat. His heart was pounding as if he'd run the miles that lay between the cave and the broken plane. His hand swept out, seeking the warmth of Sara's slim body. But the bed was empty.

  His eyes opened slowly and looked directly into the concerned depths of hers. In the predawn light that filtered into the cave, her eyes were a silver gray to match the sky outside. She crouched beside the fire, carefully feeding in small sticks of wood. The fire licked up around the fuel eagerly, and Cody felt as if it licked his skin. A moment before he had been cold, but now dread swept through him as hot as a burning branding iron.

  The look in her eyes told him that she knew he'd been dreaming. But just what did she know? She'd demanded to know how he was going to find the crash site. But did she really want to know?

  He'd learned to hide the dreams at an early age. Only his grandfather had understood and accepted them. His mother had looked at him out of worried green eyes, not so much disbelieving as frightened of what the dreams could do to her only child. And his father had been too busy trying to fit into a world that was totally foreign to his ancestors. Too busy to understand a son who would have been a shaman in an earlier time.

  Only Cody's grandfather had understood and accepted the dreams as completely natural. A gift from the Great Spirit to be cherished and used carefully. Cody sometimes felt as if they were more a curse than a gift, but he had learned to live with them, accepted them as something that was a part of him. He also learned to conceal them.

  And now, here was Sara, watching him from wide gray eyes, questioning, concerned. She'd wrapped herself in his shirt, probably the first thing that had come to hand when she got up. His eyes shifted from hers, avoiding the questions he read there.

  "You're up early." He eased out of the sleeping bag and reached for his jeans. Dog looked up from his position near the mouth of the cave, his yellow eyes offering a silent greeting.

  "You were dreaming." Cody's fingers froze on the snap of his jeans, but he refused to raise his head.

  "Was I?"

  "This is the third night in a row that you've talked in your sleep." His head jerked up, his eyes met hers for an instant before sliding away. So she hadn't been asleep those other times. "Twisted silver. You keep mentioning twisted silver." He closed his eyes as the wrecked plane came to him as clearly as if he were standing in front of it.

  "Do I?" He bent to slip a larger piece of wood onto the fire.

  Sara swallowed hard against the lump in her throat, feeling it settle heavily in her chest. He didn't want to talk about this. But she had to know.

  "It's the plane, isn't it? You've seen it in your dreams."

  Cody said nothing. He'd never lied about the dreams. He avoided m
entioning them, but he never lied if backed into a corner. There was something inside him that felt as if that would taint the dreams. His mouth tasted coppery with fear, but he wouldn't lie to her.

  Sara stood up and came around the fire to stand in front of him. "Cody, that's how you know where the crash site is, isn't it?" Her fingers gripped his forearm, pressing against the muscles as if she could force the truth from him with that pressure. When his eyes at last met hers, they were a bleak and cold green.

  "Why do you want to know?"

  She blinked. "Why shouldn't I know? I think it's reasonable that I should want to know how you're going to find Cullen. If you're seeing things in your dreams, I have a right to know what they are."

  His arm knotted beneath her fingertips for an instant before he jerked it away. "No! No one has a right to know what I dream."

  His anger was such that Sara had to force herself to stay where she was. "Cody, I don't mean to invade your privacy, but if you've seen something about Cullen, I'd like to know what it is. He's all I have in the world. Please. If you know something, tell me."

  "I don't know anything." He half turned away, avoiding the plea in her eyes. The habits were too old, too deeply ingrained to be discarded for a pair of bewitching eyes. He'd been hiding that part of himself for too long.

  Sara felt as if she were battering at a brick wall. He knew something and she had to know what it was. She had to know what he'd seen of Cullen.

  "I don't believe that. You can't tell me that you haven't dreamed about the crash the last three nights."

  He spun to face her with a suddenness that startled a gasp from her. "I've been dreaming about that damned crash ever since the plane went down. I woke up the night after it happened with sweat dripping from me. I could hardly breathe. Do you know what fear tastes like?"

  The anger that lashed out of him was so intimidating that Sara shook her head, taking a step back. Cody's hand shot out, his long fingers closing around her upper arm. The pressure stopped well short of hurtful, but it was clear that he planned on her staying right where she was.

  "It tastes like acid on your tongue. Your chest hurts with the need to breathe and your vision blurs and you want to throw up only you can't because your throat doesn't seem to be working right. That's what I felt in that dream. As if I were in the plane with them, feeling it go down, knowing it was going to crash."

  He stopped, as if afraid he'd revealed too much, and his fingers dropped away from her arm. Sara's heart was pounding and she had to swallow hard before she could force her voice out.

  "Is he... Are they dead?" The question echoed in the cavern, lingering against the rock walls.

  "I don't know. Don't you understand? I don't know anything." The agony in his voice was unmistakable. "If I knew that, I would tell you." His fingers raked through his hair before dropping to his sides and clenching into fists. "All I get is the crash itself. And there's pain." He shuddered, his eyes blank, looking at things she couldn't see. "Then the pain is gone but I don't know if it's because of death or something else."

  He shook his head and his eyes refocused on her. She wanted to cry out at the pain she read there. "It's all right. I'm sure they're alive. I'd know if Cullen was dead."

  He shook his head as if he hadn't even heard her. "It's just like the other times. I saw the crashes and I had to go and find them. And each time there was nothing but death. I want to believe this one is different, but what if it isn't?"

  Sara wrapped her arms around her body, feeling the chill morning air clear to her bones. "If you dreamed the crash right after it happened, why didn't you tell someone where it was?"

  His eyes focused on her for a moment and she read resentment in their depths. "Until you arrived, I didn't get anything but the crash. It wasn't until you showed up that something began pulling me toward the site. It was as if everything waited for your arrival."

  "Do you know where the plane went down?"

  "Not exactly. There's a.. .tugging that pulls me as we go along, but I couldn't pinpoint the place on a map."

  "Don't you think that that tugging has to mean that someone is alive? It wouldn't be the same if they were both dead, would it?"

  Cody looked into her pleading eyes and hesitated. He could agree with her. What harm would come from that? But it would be offering her a hope that could be false. He shook his head slowly.

  "I was pulled to the other crashes, too, and no one survived those. But the other two weren't as strong as this." He offered the last words as the only reassurance he could give.

  Sara bit her lip, her eyes shifting away from his as if afraid to reveal her vulnerability. She couldn't believe that Cullen was dead. She had to keep believing that he had survived the crash and would be expecting her to find him.

  "Cullen is alive." She said it flatly as if saying it could make it so.

  "I hope so."

  Her eyes flickered back up to his. "When I asked how you knew where the crash was, why didn't you tell me the truth?"

  His brows rose in a sardonic question. "I suppose you would have casually accepted it if I'd told you that I was dreaming our route? People aren't comfortable with that idea. That's why John Larkin was so reluctant to give you my name. He wanted to know how I found the others, and I told him."

  "And you just assumed that I would react the same way?" She couldn't keep the hurt from her voice.

  Cody looked at her for a long moment, realizing that it wasn't just fear of her reaction that had made him hide the truth from her. The dreams were an intensely private thing, something he kept to himself. Sara Grant had already worked her way deep into his life. Her appearance in his dreams had shown him that she was going to be important somehow. Instinctively, he fought against letting her get any closer than she already had.

  Telling her about the dreams was opening a part of himself that he shared with no one. But now that it was out and she was not looking at him as if he were a freak in a sideshow, he felt as if a tremendous burden had fallen from his shoulders. His mouth twisted in a half smile though his eyes remained guarded.

  Sara did not resist when he reached out to draw her close, but hurt feelings kept her shoulders stiff, her mouth tight. It was frightening to realize how much it hurt that he'd shut her out, labeling her an outsider in his life. It didn't matter that logic told her that that was exactly what she was. She didn't feel like an outsider and it hurt to be treated like one.

  The mat of hair on his chest felt crisp beneath her cheek, and his voice rumbled in her ear. "There aren't very many people who are comfortable with things they don't understand. John Larkin isn't alone. He's a good man, but he doesn't like things that don't come with a cut-and-dried explanation. I've learned that it's best not to tell people things that frighten them."

  His hand stroked up and down her back, and Sara felt the tension ease out of her, realizing that he was offering her more of an explanation than she really had a right to expect. She let herself relax against him, telling him without words that she understood.

  Cody bent his head over hers, feeling her acceptance sweep over him like a cleansing breeze. He hadn't realized how badly he wanted her to believe in him until now. But along with the relief came fear. She was too close. She meant too much. His hand lifted to tangle in her hair, tilting her head back. His eyes skimmed over the delicate perfection of her features. Emotion brought a tightness to his throat, but he backed away from examining that emotion to closely. Their worlds lay too far apart for him to let her get closer.

  Sara's arms came up, her hands burrowing into the shaggy thickness of his hair as his mouth lowered to hers. The kiss they shared was one of healing more than passion.

  When he lifted his head, the faint smile on his mouth was reflected in his eyes. "The storm cleared up last night."

  Sara turned in his arms to look outside. It couldn't be said that the weather was glorious, but the sleet had stopped and there were even hints of weak sunshine struggling through the clouds.
<
br />   Dancer shifted restlessly, and Cody gave Sara a quick squeeze before his arms fell away from her. "We'd better get started. I want to try and make up for some of the time the storm cost us yesterday."

  ❧

  The Survivor

  Cullen winced as he stumbled over a dip in the ground and jarred his injured leg. Even without the bandage the knee refused to bend, but that didn't stop it from hurting. He steadied himself on the heavy branch he'd whittled into a crude cane.

  His watch had been shattered in the crash, but a glance up at the sky told him that he should start looking for a place to camp for the night. A place that could be guarded, he added silently. He didn't have to glance over his shoulder to see the shadowy form that had been trailing him for the past two days. Whether he saw it or not, he knew the coyote was back there. He'd first seen it two mornings ago, and the animal had been trailing along behind him ever since.

  His mouth twisted in a humorless smile. Nature had a way of taking care of loose ends. The coyote could scent an injured animal and that was exactly what Cullen was—an injured animal. He was too big for the coyote to risk a direct confrontation with him, but the animal had the patience of a hunter. Sooner or later this strange, two-legged beast would be his. Exhaustion, cold temperature, or his injuries would fell him. It didn't matter to the coyote which it was.

  Two hours later, Cullen huddled deeper into his sleeping bag. He was sitting up, his back to a rock overhang, a crackling fire between him and the rest of the world. His right hand lay outside the sleeping bag, the heavy pistol on his good knee. He could doze in this position without falling completely asleep and leaving himself vulnerable. He didn't think it was his imagination that put the occasional stealthy movement into the darkness beyond the firelight.

  The temperature was dropping rapidly. Winter was becoming an undeniable fact. The snow was still little more than a shallow covering, but it wouldn't be long before it began to deepen.

  He closed his eyes wearily. He wasn't moving fast enough. If he was going to beat winter down out of the mountains, he had to hurry. But with his leg in the condition it was in, every step was a painful effort. And he couldn't afford to risk a fall. He forced his eyes open and added a few more sticks to the fire.