Dead Heat (35 page)

“If I die after a day of watching beautiful horses, that would be okay,” Joseph said.

The spirits that seemed to be always hovering around Joseph, even if Charles was the only one who could see them, hit Charles so hard he could barely breathe. Their impact forced him to hesitate, stop walking altogether, and spread his legs a bit to keep his balance.

“You have a task yet,” he murmured when he could. He headed for the house. “Let me see if they’ll give you a little more strength to do what is necessary.”

“Tell those spirits that if they want him so badly, they might cure his cancer,” said Maggie tartly.

“It’s worth my life to tell the spirits anything,” Charles said. “You know better than to ask.”

He was starting to get an odd notion about those spirits. The spirits who petitioned him were not human, they were spirits of the earth and air. That didn’t mean there weren’t spirits of the dead. Usually the dead had a weight to them, a feeling of wrongness. The spirits surrounding Joseph burned with purpose, a heat that made Charles’s heart pound in his chest and called to Brother Wolf. There was nothing twisted or wrong in them.

Still. This incident he and Anna were unraveling involved so many dead innocents: children killed before they had a chance to decide who they were going to be. Unfinished.

The innocent dead … he’d only met one of those and if Mercy, who could see ghosts better than anyone he’d ever met, had not been with him, he’d never have connected that spirit to the child who’d been killed on that stretch of road a dozen years before. Mercy had seen the boy quite clearly, but Charles had only felt a hot sizzle on his skin, like a sunburn, only deeper.

Maybe this heat he felt from these spirits was like that child, only multiplied by all the dead who were owed balance because of the loss of their chance at life. Not rage, but vengeance.

Still, what service could an old man dying of cancer provide for dead children?

“Charles?” Anna asked hesitantly. “Are you going to keep Joseph out here all afternoon?”

He wondered how long he’d been standing still. Without replying he carried Joseph into the house.

“Anna?” he asked. “Could you come with me?” He thought again. “Maggie, it would be best if you stayed with Mackie and Michael.”

“Where do you want me?” asked Max. “I know how to hook up all of Granddad’s machinery.”

Max was like Samuel, Charles thought, a good man to have at your back. And he brought nothing with him that might change the nature of what Charles wanted to do.

Maggie … he didn’t quite trust what Maggie wanted. Maggie was never happy where she was, always looking elsewhere for happiness, for fulfillment. As much as she loved Joseph, and she did, she was not a restful person.

“Yes,” he told Max. “Come with us.”

Maggie looked at him with stricken eyes, and he felt as though he’d struck her.

“Strength and purpose are useful qualities,” he told her. “But for what I’m going to attempt, we need quiet souls.”

He didn’t know if it was enough, but he left Maggie and the kids in the living room and headed up to Joseph’s rooms.

He and Max helped Joseph into the bathroom to take care of the necessities of living, while Anna pulled back the bedding and generally made herself scarce so as not to embarrass Joseph. Charles hadn’t had to say anything to her. His mate was one of the most perceptive people he’d ever met.

They laid the old man, who had once been one of the toughest men Charles had ever met, on the bed, and he struggled to draw breath enough to talk. It made Charles’s heart hurt to see him this way.

“Shh,” said Charles.

He looked around the room for … something. “I don’t suppose there’s still a cello around here someplace, is there?” There used to be. Kage had played cello.

Max frowned. “Actually, I think there is. Kage’s old cello is still in his room here. Grandma makes him play it every Christmas. He starts sneaking practices in along about November. He says he doesn’t take it home because it just sits there and makes him feel guilty for not practicing an hour a day like Grandma used to make him do. Hold on.”

As soon as he was gone, Anna said, “You want me to play?”

“We need music,” he said, knowing it was true. “I think I need you to start it, and the cello is where your music lives.”

“They’re talking to you today,” she said. “The spirits. What are they saying?”

“That’s the problem,” he said. “Usually I know exactly what they want me to do. All I have to do is decide if I’m going to accommodate them or not. This time … all I can do is follow my instincts.”

“Good enough for me,” she said as Max came back into the room with a cello in a canvas carry bag.

Anna took the instrument, stripped away the wrappings, and gave it a cursory examination. “New strings,” she said as she tuned it. “Not a bad instrument.” She took the bow, rosined it briskly, and drew it across the strings.

Her eyebrows rose at the tone. “Better than I thought. Not as good as the one you got me, but it’s better than most student instruments. Do you have a song in mind?”

“Something … beautiful, but still upbeat.” He tried to put his feelings into words.

She nodded and then started playing.

“
Lord of the Rings
,” said Max, startled.

Charles closed his eyes, listening, and it was all right. He raised his voice in answer to the cello. No words, just music, until the words became necessary. By that time he was so lost in music, which he and Anna had morphed into their own song, that he didn’t even know what language he sang in, let alone what the meaning of the words were. They were just a shape in the music he and Anna made together.

The music built and the power burned down his arms into his hands, so he placed those hands on Joseph. When it was over and the heat was gone, Joseph slept comfortably. The heat, the fire in his veins, was gone. The room was silent, and he knew that his earlier theory was right.

For some reason, the dead, the children killed by the fae who’d attacked the Sani family, were very interested in Joseph. That was something he wasn’t going to share with Maggie and her very Navajo view of the dead. Maybe he should tell Joseph.

He covered the sleeping man while Anna put the cello back in its case. Max took it without a word and they all left, shutting the door quietly. Max started down the hallway farther into the depths of the house and stopped.

He turned back to them and met Charles’s eye.

“Anyone hearing that,” he said, “has to believe in magic.”

He left them. Anna took Charles down the hall in the other direction, toward the main part of the house.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he told her. “I find that somewhat unsettling.”

She took a deep breath, like an actress going onstage, pasted a big smile on her face, and said, “I find it
somewhat
reassuring that I’m not the only one who feels like I should be running around shouting, ‘Where’s the script? Where’s the script? If only I had a script I’d know what the freak I’m supposed to be doing.’”

While Charles had been making magic, Maggie, Mackie, and Michael had made sandwiches for everyone, since Ernestine had the day off. Maggie had also made a huge effort at cheer for the sake of the children.

“Where’s Chelsea?” Charles asked. Anna remembered that Chelsea was planning on coming home with the kids.

“Teri ate something that disagreed with her, so Mom borrowed an outfit and she’s going to take over Teri’s ride in the western pleasure futurity elimination round,” Max said.

“Ánáli Hastiin said she should,” added Mackie.

“Eat,” said Maggie, setting a giant plate of sandwiches down at the table where she’d already set a stack of dishes.

“What are your plans for the rest of the afternoon?” asked Max. “If you aren’t busy, Hosteen suggested I take you for a ride around the ranch. He said to remind you that you are guests, not guards. He had two of his pack follow us from the show grounds. They’re patrolling the grounds.”

Anna looked at Charles.

“Fine with me,” he said.

“What horses is Hosteen having you look at?” Max asked.

“I left the list upstairs,” Anna said. “Let me go get it.”

Anna and Mackie did the dishes while Max looked over the list with a pencil he used to make notes.

“We could go out for a ride, Anna,” he suggested when he was done scribbling. “Merrylegs is here. We’re not showing her at the big show this year. She’s more of a trail horse than an arena horse, though she’s not nearly as bad as Portabella that way.”

And, Anna thought, it would get them out of the house and her out from under Maggie’s glower. It was Charles who’d made her stay downstairs. So why was Anna getting the cold shoulder? Maggie hadn’t so much as looked at her since they’d come down the stairs.

Okay, she had to be honest. She understood. She didn’t like it, it upset her sense of justice, but she understood. Charles had explained his reason for leaving Maggie downstairs, which Maggie could accept. But Anna had gone up with him and with Joseph. Anna, young and werewolf Anna, had taken Maggie’s place.

“A ride sounds like fun,” Anna said, and Charles nodded.

“Can I come?” asked Michael.

“Sure,” said Maggie.

Mackie started to say something, but she looked at her grandmother and hesitated. Anna saw the moment she made the decision.

“Grandma? I’m tired of horses today. I don’t want to go for another ride.”

“You can stay with me, then,” Maggie said. “We’ll go play some Candy Land.”

This time they tacked up their own horses while Max found saddles that fit and bridles that would work.

“First time I ever rode a horse, I was eight,” he told them, helping Michael brush the horse he’d picked for him, a short, stout, brown-and-white-spotted half Arab named Romeo. “Kage was dating my mom and he was like, ‘Come ride some horses.’ When she and I got home that night I said—”

“‘You gotta marry him, Mom,’” said Michael. “‘He has
horses
.’”

Max laughed. “That’s right, pipsqueak. Maybe if I didn’t like horses so much, Mom wouldn’t have married Kage. And then you wouldn’t even be around.”

“Yes, I would,” Michael answered. “Because Daddy says I’m his penance for past sins.”

Anna hid her grin as she picked up Merrylegs’s foot to clean it. Merrylegs was a seven-year-old mare of indifferent breeding (Max’s words) who’d come to the Sanis as a training prospect. When her owner discovered boys, she’d turned over the mare’s registration and ownership in return for back board and training fees.

“She’s sweet as pie,” Max said. “Not a show horse of any kind. But she’ll try her heart out for you and take care of you. Mackie rides her a lot on the trails.”

For Charles, Max brought Portabella.

“She’s on your list,” Max said. “And she’s a fun ride on the trails.”

Merrylegs, as promised, was sweet and responsive. She also had a trot that made Anna glad she’d inherited her mom’s teeth and not her dad’s because if she’d had any fillings they’d have been gone by the time the ride was over. Merry’s canter was better and her walk was brisk, but that trot was horrible.

“Yeah,” said Max, though Anna hadn’t said anything. “It’s those really short and straight pasterns. She’s like riding a jackhammer. But she’ll canter forever, and her canter is lovely.”

They rode past the hill where Anna had turned Portabella around the day before. Max led them on by it and out into the desert.

“Okay,” he said. “You might as well see her strengths, right? And she’s best out here where common sense and willingness mean more than pretty.”

So they rode, and as a sort of camaraderie settled over them, Max gave Charles a half-shy look. “How did you meet Granddad?” he asked.

Anna wondered if he was going to answer Max. He didn’t often speak about the past unless it was important to something going on in the here and now. It was, Samuel had told her once, how the old wolves coped with the passing of time. Samuel was a lot older than Charles.

But the magic of riding in the last of the afternoon sun, the smell of horses, and the rhythm of the ride had, she decided, caught him up in the magic of the shared experience. Or maybe he didn’t have the heart to shut Max down with one of his usual conversation-killing two-words-or-less answers.

“I first saw him when he was about Michael’s age,” said Charles. “Really met him when he was barely a teenager in a bar fight in Phoenix—it can be a hard thing to be a different color when men get together and get drunk. I was walking by and I heard a war cry.” His horse snorted and shook her head; Charles patted her. “And then a whole lot of cursing and glass breaking. But it was the war cry that made me wade into that bar fight and start clearing it out. At the bottom of a pile of battered veterans—it was just after World War Two—was this skinny little Indian kid of about twelve or thirteen.”

Charles’s face lighted with the sudden grin he had sometimes. “I said, ‘Takes a real man to hit a kid.’” His grin widened. “One of the guys—he was sporting the start of a real beauty of a shiner—he said, ‘Hell, mister, all I said was that he should get his butt out of here because he was too Indian to be safe with all the rough stock in here drinking like fishes. And the kid lit into me like I punched him.’”

Charles ran his hand down the shiny long neck of his horse and then said, “Joseph never did have any quit in him. Though he learned, eventually, to pick his battles. I’d been up conducting my father’s business with Hosteen when someone told him that Joseph was missing. His mother had found out what Hosteen was and picked up and left. I guess Joseph overheard one of the hands saying that she’d probably run down to Phoenix to earn a living on her back in the bars there, which she hadn’t. Hosteen had followed her all the way back to her sister’s home out in the Four Corners area to make sure she was safe. But he told Joseph he wouldn’t talk about her to him, and Joseph took him at his word, so Joseph didn’t know where she’d gone. When he overheard the cowboys, he decided he couldn’t leave his mother in trouble. So he stole one of the ranch trucks and drove it into Phoenix with the intention of finding his mother if he had to go to every bar in town to do so. When Hosteen figured out what happened, and those two cowboys never worked on the Sanis’ ranch again, he took the whole pack, and me, to Phoenix to find Joseph.”