Dead Heat (14 page)

“The big grin on your face already said a mouthful,” Charles told her. “Mere words are not necessary.”

“You might try her with Portabella,” said a breathless voice just outside the arena.

“Dad?” Kage sounded shocked. “What are you doing down here—you should be in bed.”

Sure enough, Joseph Sani stood watching with both hands on the upper surface of the arena fence. “I’ll have plenty of time to lie down when I’m dead.” He nodded at Anna. “Portabella is full of fun like that. She’d like to spend her days in the mountains up there in Montana. She’d like that.”

“You named a horse after a mushroom?” asked Anna.

“Her name is Al Mazrah Uhibboki,” Mateo said. “We had to call her something pronounceable. Her grandsire is Port Bask—so Portabella.”

“Her real name is what?” Anna asked.

“Al Mazrah is the stud farm that bred her,” Kage said. “Uhibboki means, we think, ‘I love you.’ So Al Mazrah Uhibboki. Al Mazrah stud is in Indiana and no one there speaks Arabic. No one here speaks Arabic, either, so I don’t know for sure. And we are probably pronouncing it wrong anyway.”

Joseph laughed, and then he coughed harshly a couple of times.

“Dad,” said Kage.

“Don’t fuss,” Joseph said. “When I’m dead you can fuss. I needed to smell the horses again.” He closed his eyes and took a shallow breath. He opened them and said, “Better than medicine for an old man. And I need to talk to Charles. Ernestine said you were at the barn.”

“How did you get here?” Kage asked.

“I took the last UTV,” he said. “But I think I’ll let Charles drive me back up. We can talk on the way.” He glanced at Kage. “You and Mateo might want to show Anna some of the new babies. I hear that our Kalli had a filly yesterday that everyone is over the moon about.”

Charles waited at Joseph’s unspoken request while Mateo and Kage took Anna off to look at the foals. When they were out of sight, Charles said, “Do you need me to carry you? Won’t be the first time.”

Joseph laughed. “That’s for damned sure. There was that one week I was determined to drink every bar in the town dry.”

“I don’t remember that,” said Charles gravely. “But I was thinking about when that mustang dumped you and you broke your leg twenty miles from anywhere. Horse made it back and your dad and I finally went out as wolves to find you. He ran back for help and I carried you halfway home before help came.”

“Really?” said Joseph tentatively. “You don’t remember?”

“Someone asked me not to,” said Charles. “And I told him I would oblige him. So no. I don’t remember.”

Joseph nodded. “You know, I think I could make it back to the UTV, but I’m sure that if I did, I couldn’t talk with you and that’s important. I’m too old for pride.”

Charles picked him up with considerably less effort than he’d used to carry Joseph on that long-ago walk into town, because a frail old man weighs a lot less than a wiry cowboy. Charles wondered if the reason his dad did not associate much with humans was that they grew old and died. He did not enjoy the sorrow, but he would not have missed the years that he and Joseph were friends, either. Such joy was worth a little sorrow.

The lights were off in the big arena, and no one saw Joseph being carried out to the utility vehicle. The old man had pushed himself too far. Even if the spirits had granted him strength, muscles that had lain in bed for three months were not as able as they could be.

He didn’t say any of that, because Joseph knew it as well as Charles did.

He put Joseph in the passenger seat and climbed into the utility vehicle beside him. “You’re going to have to tell me how to start this thing,” he said.

“You don’t use ATVs or UTVs up in those mountains of yours?” Joseph asked. “I thought there was a lot of country too rough for trucks in Montana.”

“That’s what horses are for,” Charles told him, and Joseph laughed, though Charles hadn’t meant to be funny.

With the old man’s help, he got the vehicle started and heading the right way.

“Chelsea,” said Joseph in a low voice. “Was that because I wouldn’t let you change me? My father thinks it is.”

“Chelsea was because of Chelsea,” Charles told him. “If she had not belonged to your family, I’d have done the same thing.” And because it was Joseph, he shared the full truth, shameful as it was. Consent was important; it ought to be necessary. “I’m glad I knew she was Kage’s wife, that I could contact him to get permission. My wolf admired her toughness. There aren’t many people who can face down a fae geas. I think that he would have insisted we Change her no matter what Kage had said.”

Joseph listened, and said, “That’s pretty messed up. But it will probably work out okay.”

“I hope so,” Charles said.

“Brother Wolf isn’t going to try that with me?” Joseph’s voice was wary.

Charles laughed, a small laugh that sounded like it could have been something else. “Brother Wolf is already in mourning for you. He’d roll over and die for you, but he won’t do something you’ll hate him, hate me, for. You’re safe.”

They drove for a little while.

“I like Chelsea,” Joseph said, breaking the comfortable silence. “She stands up to Hosteen when everyone else backs down. She is tough.” He paused. “I would not have chosen this for her, though. Death is a gift, Charles.”

“When you are ready to go,” agreed Charles. “But not when you have three young children who need you. Do you think
she
would have chosen death over being a werewolf?”

Joseph didn’t answer. It was a big question, and he liked to take his time with those.

“He’s softer than I remember him,” Kage said as he drove Anna back to the house. “Your husband, Charles. Dad would be so happy when he’d come visit, but he scared the pants off me. Mom would get this funny look and do her best to find some reason to go visit relatives. Sometimes she’d take me with her. He always looked at me like he was deciding how best to kill me.”

Anna couldn’t help but laugh. “I’ve seen that look,” she said. “If it helps, I think it’s his default when he’s worried about something. Not usually murder.”
Usually when he kills, his face is very quiet. It doesn’t look like he’s thinking at all.

“But he wasn’t like that today,” Kage said.

She made a neutral noise and then caught herself. She didn’t talk about her husband to people, but he was right, Charles had been softer with him. “You know what his job is, right?”

Kage nodded. “Bran’s troubleshooter and assassin.”

“That’s right,” she said. “It means that he can’t care about anyone, you know? Because that might be the guy who goes nuts and starts a bloodbath Charles has to finish. It was worse after the werewolves came out because it meant that little bit of gray area that allowed him not to kill every-freaking-body who didn’t toe the line disappeared.”

Kage stiffened.

“Chelsea’s not home free,” she told him. “But she’s tough and she controls herself, right? I’ve seen her kids; they’ve grown up with rules tempered with love. That’s a good place to start if you become a werewolf.”

“But he could be the one called to take care of her if something goes wrong,” he said.

“Probably not,” she disagreed. “That would be your grandfather.”

“Hosteen?” Kage swallowed. “He’d kill her just because.”

She started to protest, then swallowed it. She didn’t know Hosteen; she couldn’t offer reassurances about what Hosteen might or might not do.

They bumped along quietly for a little and then, when the lights of the house were visible, Anna said, “Anyway. Charles is hard. He has to be. Justice and law, right? Because without those he cannot function. He doesn’t get close to people—just his father, his brother, his foster sister, and me. And Joseph. That makes you important to him.”

He looked at her like he couldn’t figure out why she’d told him that.

“You can go to him for help,” she said. “That’s why he made you get mad at him—so you’d know he was safe. Hosteen has issues with Chelsea. If you think things are getting out of hand, you call us, okay? Charles isn’t soft. He can’t afford to be soft. But he is always just.” She smiled. “And he’s not afraid of Hosteen.”

Kage nodded. “Okay. I’ll keep it in mind.”

They pulled into the parking area next to the house. Kage walked back to the bedroom where his wife was, and Anna walked with him.

Chelsea slept, curled up in the corner of the bed. They’d left the lights on because nothing short of a nuclear explosion was going to wake her up.

Maggie was seated in a rocking chair, reading a book that she’d set down as soon as Kage appeared. Hosteen had a book, too, but his brooding unhappiness was strong enough that Anna’s wolf took a decided interest.

Maggie watched her son and then stood up. “Anna?” she said. “Could I have a word with you?”

“
Do
you think I did the wrong thing? Changing Chelsea instead of letting her die?” Charles asked, again. They were coming up to the house, but Charles drove past the turnoff for the driveway.

“Do I? Yes.” That was his friend. Blunt to the point of rudeness, but only with Charles. “Does she?” Joseph made an ambiguous sound that might have been a sigh if he’d had more air. “I think that in the heat of the moment, she would have fought for her life. Any kind of life. I think if you asked her right now, she’d say she was grateful. What she will say in five years or ten?” He shrugged.

“Did you know she was a witch?” Charles asked.

Joseph nodded. “She told me before she married my son. She wanted Maggie and me to understand what we were getting ourselves into. Black witches hunt down people like Chelsea; untrained witches apparently can feed them a lot of power. She’s pretty sure that her first husband was killed by a witch hunting her. She changed her name, bundled Max up, and moved from Michigan to Arizona. I told her that we already had werewolves; a witch would be a welcome change.”

“And Maggie?”

Joseph said, “It was the worst argument we ever had—and I don’t think either of us said a word about it.” He shrugged. “My father likes to argue, to use words. I think his way is better—but it is not Maggie’s way. So we were silent for a while and things went back to normal. Maggie likes her now.”

“But not Hosteen.”

Joseph frowned fiercely. “He keeps the old ways so alive he forgets what is true and what is false. He believes witches are evil because the Navajo stories of witches are all about evil witches. He still believes in the monsters in the stories his mother told him and her mother told her.”

“Navajo witchcraft is such that Navajo witches are evil. If they are not evil, then they are not witches,” Charles said. “And your father is right about the monsters. I’ve met a few of them. The worst monsters hide in plain sight.”

Joseph frowned at him. “Monsters here?”

“I’ve seen skinwalkers who wear the skins of dead men so they look like the person they have killed. I have seen the Cold Woman,” Charles said. He’d forgotten how easy it was to talk to Joseph. “So have you. Do you remember that woman in that old bar in Willcox? The persistent one who tried to get us both to come home with her?”

“Yes,” Joseph admitted. “You were pretty adamant that we had to wait for a friend we didn’t have.”

“Two men went missing that night and were found dead in their car a few weeks later a couple hundred miles away,” Charles said.

“She was the Cold Woman,” he said. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t know then, just knew that she didn’t smell human. She was gorgeous. In a room full of richer-looking, certainly better-looking men”—Joseph nudged him with an elbow—“she picks two dirty, tired cowboys? Felt like a trap. I figured out who she was after the bodies turned up. There were no wounds. Just two dead men sitting in a car in the middle of a pleasant spring day, frozen all the way through. The coroner figured someone had murdered them in an ice locker or commercial freezer, then staged the bodies.”

“The Cold Woman … why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

“By the time I figured it out, you’d met Maggie. The Cold Woman wasn’t as important as other things.”

“I think I’m glad I didn’t know,” Joseph said.

“Too much knowledge can make you paranoid all the time,” Charles agreed. “It can also make you a target.” They came to the junction where the Sani road met the highway. He turned the UTV around and headed back to the ranch house.

“So if my father is right about everything—is Chelsea evil?”

“Hosteen is not right about everything.” Charles grinned at Joseph’s ironic tones. “And Chelsea is no more evil than you or I.” He paused thoughtfully. “Than I am, anyway. I don’t know about you.” More seriously he said, “There is a scent to black magic—I would smell it.”

“Ah, good,” Joseph said. Then he said, in the same tone, “My wife will ask you to Change her after I’m dead.”

Charles had no time to prepare. No warning to brace himself, and he felt as though he’d been punched: Maggie.

He had loved her once. She was a fiery warrior, Maggie. Tough and smart and funny—and unexpectedly tender. If he closed his eyes he could still see her, her beautiful bright eyes wet and luminous. There were many things in his years on earth that were faded by time, but not that night. That night was clear as cut glass.

“If you would have me, I would be yours,” Maggie said, moonlight softening her fierce young features into something more accessible.

He knew how hard those words were from this proud woman who did not believe in making herself vulnerable for anyone. Her childhood had been hard and hadn’t made it easy for her to trust.

The night air was crisp—spring in the desert. The wooden boards of her porch were uneven under his feet. He could hear the wild-caught horses in the corrals moving idly a dozen yards from the little house. Could hear the soft sounds of Joseph’s sleeping breath.

Her roughened hands reached out slowly, and he did not back away. They touched his face and he closed his eyes, allowing himself the comfort of her touch. To be touched with love was uncommon in his life, and he treasured it, absorbed it.

She was beautiful, but that had nothing to do with why he loved her. He loved her for her refusal to give in to a world that twice judged her wrongly, first for the color of her skin and then for her sex. He loved her for the joy she took in the sun on her back and the horses she rode. He loved her for the laughter she found in danger and storms.