Honor and duty weren’t love. Neither was kindness.
Janna would rather live the rest of her life in the wild than watch Ty become bitter and ground down by regrets for the freedom and the dream he had lost.
And she would rather die than live to see the day when Ty stood like a captive mustang, his head down and his eyes as dead as stones.
“Go ahead and cry,” he said, folding her into his arms, rocking her. “It’s all right, sugar. It’s all right. You’ll have the home you’ve dreamed of if it’s the last thing I do. It’s the very least that I owe you.”
She closed her eyes to conceal the wave of pain his words had caused. Very gently she brushed her lips over his shirtfront, savoring for the last time his heat, his scent, his strength, the male vitality that radiated from him.
“You owe me nothing at all.”
His laugh was harsh and humorless. “Like hell I don’t. You saved my life, and all I’ve done since then is take from you. When I think of you throwing yourself under Lucifer’s hooves just to catch him for me, I…”
Ty’s words faded into a hoarse sound. Strong arms tightened almost painfully around Janna, as though he was trying to convince himself that she was all right despite all the dangers she had endured for him.
“I didn’t catch Lucifer to make you feel obligated to me,” Janna said quietly. “I did it so Lucifer wouldn’t be killed by some greedy mustanger or be caught by a man too cruel to do anything but make the horse into a killer. You were the one who gentled Lucifer. You were the one who taught him to trust a man. Without that, what I did would have been worse than useless. Thank yourself for Lucifer, not me.”
Ty tilted up Janna’s chin and stared at her translucent gray eyes. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
“I know it. You don’t owe me anything. Not for your life, not for Lucifer, and not for the pleasure we shared. Not one damn thing. Once we get to the fort we’re quits. You’re as free as Lucifer once was. And so am I.”
A chill came over Ty, making his skin tighten and move in primitive reflex. Janna’s voice was calm and precise, lacking in emotion, as bleak as the darkness underlying her smile. She was pulling away from him, cutting the ties that had grown silently, powerfully between them during the time they had spent in the hidden valley.
“No.”
Ty said nothing more, just the single word denying what Janna had said. Before she could say anything in argument, he turned away and whistled shrilly.
Moments later Lucifer came trotting over and began lipping at Ty’s shirt in search of the pinch of salt Ty often had hidden in a twist of paper. There was no salt today, simply the voice and hands Lucifer had come to enjoy.
Ty petted the stallion for a few moments before he picked up the heavy saddlebags Mad Jack had left behind. Ty had cut slits in the leather that joined the saddlebags. Through the slits he had threaded the surcingle. Once the strap had been tightened, the saddlebags would stay in place on the stallion’s back.
Lucifer didn’t care for the strap around his barrel, but he had become accustomed to it. He did nothing more than briefly lay back his ears when the leather tightened just behind his front legs. Ty praised the stallion, shrugged his own backpack into place, and vaulted onto the mustang’s back. It was a heavy load Lucifer was carrying, but Ty wasn’t worried. The stallion was an unusually powerful horse. Even if Ty had added a saddle to the load, Lucifer wouldn’t have been overburdened for normal travel.
“I’ll scout the area beyond the slot,” he said. “Get Zebra over there and wait for my signal.”
“Ty, I won’t let you—”
“Let me? Let me!” he interrupted, furious. “To hell with ‘letting.’ You listen to me and you listen good. You might be pregnant. If you think I’ll run off and leave an orphaned girl who could be carrying my child to fend for herself in Indian country, there’s no damned point in even talking to you. I’ll try hammering my message through that thick skull of yours after we get to the fort. Maybe by then I’ll have cooled down or you’ll have grown up. Until then, shut up and stop distracting me or neither one of us will live to see tomorrow.”
Lucifer leaped into a canter before Janna had a chance to speak, even if she had been able to think of something to say.
By the time the stallion reached the exit to the valley, Ty had gotten his temper under control. He didn’t permit himself to think about Janna and the immediate past, only about Cascabel and the immediate future.
Ty dismounted and looked at the area right in front of the cleft. No new tracks marked the meadow. A vague, telltale trail had been worn through the grass despite his and Janna’s efforts never to take the same way twice into the cleft.
It doesn’t matter now. By the time we come back the grass will have regrown. And when we do come back, we won’t have to try to live so small we don’t even cast shadows.
Beyond the ghostly paths there were no signs that anything had ever passed through the cleft to the outer world. Ty picked his way over the narrow watercourse and through the shadowed slot between rock walls. The afternoon light glowed overhead, telling him that the sky was nearly cloudless. Until the sun went down they would be vulnerable to discovery, for there would be no rain to conceal their presence while they crossed the wild land.
Yet they had no choice but to move in daylight. There was simply too much risk that one of the horses would injure itself scrambling over the cleft’s treacherous watercourse in the dark. Besides, even if they got through the slot safely at night and then traveled until dawn, they would still be deep within Cascabel’s preferred range when the sun once more rose, exposing them to discovery.
Their best chance was to sneak out of the slot and take a long, looping approach to the fort, hoping that Cascabel would have been driven to the southern edges of his territory while the two of them traversed the northern part. The fort itself was a hard three-day ride, and there was no haven short of the stockade walls.
Standing well back from the sunlit exit to the cleft, Ty pulled out his spyglass and examined as much of the land as he could see beyond the stone walls. A quick look showed nothing. A long look showed no more. A point-by-point survey revealed no sign of renegades.
Wish my backbone didn’t itch.
But it did, and Ty wasn’t going to ignore his instincts. There was danger out there. His job was to find out where and how much. Unconsciously he fingered the hilt of the big knife he always carried at his belt. He waited for fifteen minutes, then lifted the spyglass and studied the land again. Again he saw nothing to alarm him. He took off his backpack, checked the load in his carbine, grabbed a box of bullets and went out to have a closer look at the land.
He was no more than thirty feet from the cleft when he cut the trail of three unshod ponies. The hoofprints stayed together and marked a purposeful course, telling Ty that the horses had been ridden. The horses had come out of Cascabel’s usual territory.
As Ty followed the traces he hoped that the Army had been successful in driving the renegades away. That hope died when he saw other tracks meet those that he was following. The two sets of tracks mingled, then split once more, heading in all directions, as though the riders had exchanged information and had then separated and gone to search for something.
Ty had a terrible suspicion that what the renegades were searching for was a bruja called Janna Wayland.
Keeping to cover as much as possible, crawling when he had to, walking when he could, Ty followed the tracks that crisscrossed the flatlands in front of the cleft. Everything he saw brought him to the same conclusion—the renegades were going to beat the bushes and ravines until their auburn-haired quarry burst from cover. Then they would run her down and bring her back to Cascabel. There would be medicine chants and dances, celebrations of past victories and future coups. Afterward Cascabel would lead his renegades into war with Janna’s long hair hanging from his lance like a flag, proving to the world that his spirit was the greatest one moving over the wild face
of the land.
For a moment Ty considered simply sneaking back to the cleft and waiting until Cascabel got tired of searching for his elusive quarry. That was what Janna had done in the past—hide. But in the past, Cascabel hadn’t been so determined to catch her. If Ty and Janna retreated to the valley and then were found, they would be trapped in a stone bottle with no chance of escape. Better that they take their chances in the open.
Retreating silently back toward the cleft, Ty made a brief side trip to the top of a rise. From there he hoped to get a better view of the rugged land they had to cross. Just before he reached the edge of the rise, he took off his hat and went down on his stomach, presenting as little human silhouette as possible.
An instant later he was glad he had taken the trouble to be very cautious. On the far side of the rise, four warriors sat on their heels, arguing and gesticulating abruptly as they divided up the area to be searched for the Shadow of Flame, the witch who had been stealing Cascabel’s spirit. Just beyond the warriors, seven horses grazed on whatever was within reach.
Four renegades. Seven horses. And my backbone is on fire.
The only warning Ty had was a slight whisper of sound behind him. He rolled onto his back and lashed out with his booted feet as the renegade attacked.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Ty’s kick knocked the air from the Indian’s lungs, preventing him from crying out and alerting the others. Even so, Ty had no sooner put his hand on his knife hilt than the renegade was on his knees and trying to bring his rifle to bear. Ty threw himself forward, pinning the other man to the ground with a hard forearm across his throat. A knife flashed and blood burst silently into sunlight. The renegade jerked once, twice, and then lay motionless.
For a few instants it was all Ty could do to breathe despite the screaming of his instincts that the danger had just begun, not ended, and he should be running rather than lying half-stunned. He rolled off the dead renegade and began collecting himself, relying on the survival reflexes he had learned in war. He cleaned his knife blade and put it back in its sheath. He picked up the carbine, checked it for dirt or mechanical damage, found none and made sure the weapon was ready for instant use.
Only then did he retreat silently, pausing long enough to close the dead warrior’s eyes.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…And may God have mercy on both our souls.
Three hundred feet away Janna sank slowly to her knees, feeling as though her own heart had burst. The barrel of the pistol she was holding clanked softly against stone. She took a deep breath, then another, trying to quiet her body’s trembling as she watched Ty glide from brush to boulder, retreating toward the cleft’s uncertain shelter.
It had torn Janna apart to stay within the slot’s narrow shadow, knowing as she did from Ty’s actions that he must have cut the trail of renegades. She had been watching him for the past half hour while he reconnoitered. Her eyes ached from staring out and trying to guess what he was reading from various signs crisscrossing the earth.
Then an Indian had risen up out of the very ground and launched himself at Ty, choosing the greater glory of personal combat to the sure kill offered by picking off Ty with a rifle. Even though the range had been too far for Janna to use the pistol with real accuracy, she had reached for the gun.
The fight had ended before she could even lift the weapon above her waist to take aim. She had never seen a man so quick as Ty, or so deadly in that quickness. She realized at that instant just how much of his strength he held in check when he was with her.
And he could have died despite all his power and speed, his blood a crimson stain bursting from his body to be drunk by the thirsty earth. All that was Ty, the passion and the laughter, the anger and the sensual teasing, the silence and the silken dream, all of it gone between one breath and the next.
She watched each of his movements hungrily, needing the reassurance that he was alive. She scanned the land behind him as well, and she did it from over the barrel of the pistol, wanting to be able to shoot quickly at anything she saw.
Despite her alertness, she didn’t see the second renegade until the sun glinted off a rifle barrel as the warrior shifted position to shoot at Ty. Not even bothering to aim carefully, Janna triggered a shot in the direction of the Indian.
At the sound of the shot, Ty dived for cover in a shallow ditch left behind by storm water fanning out from the cleft’s narrow mouth. A few instants later he had his hat off and his carbine barrel resting on the lip of the ditch as he searched for the source of the attack. He didn’t have to search long. The Indian shifted his aim again, sending more sunlight off his rifle barrel and drawing another shot from the cleft.
Janna’s second bullet came much closer than the first had. The renegade’s answering shot sent rock chips flying not four feet from her.
Despite the heavy pack Ty wore, he was up and sprinting for the next bit of cover while the renegade reloaded. He halfway expected to draw more fire from the other Indians, but none came. He hit the dirt a second before Janna fired at the rifle barrel that was once more poking out from a low mound of rocks and brush. The sharper crack of a rifle shot occurred a split second after she triggered her pistol.
He scrambled up and began running again, counting off the seconds he had before he must throw himself to the ground again. As intently as a hawk, Janna watched the cover that concealed the renegade. Steadying the heavy pistol with both hands, she waited for the man to reload and poke the rifle barrel out again, giving her a target.
Suddenly a flash of human movement off to the side caught Janna’s eye. She screamed at Ty to take cover as she spun to the left and fired. Two rifle shots rang out, kicking dirt just in front of Ty. He flattened out into another shallow runoff ditch while she fired a shot at the original attacker.
Five, Ty counted silently to himself. That’s it. She has to reload.
The pistol in Janna’s hand clicked loudly twice before she realized that she was out of ammunition.
“Reload!” yelled Ty without looking away from his right, where the new attacker was hidden. Come on, come on, he silently urged the second renegade. Show yourself.
Reloading was much easier said than done for Janna. White lipped, she worked to eject the spent casings, fumble bullets from her pocket and shove them one by one into the six waiting chambers. This time she wouldn’t leave one chamber empty as a precaution against accidentally discharging the revolver. She wanted all six shots and she wanted them right now.
But first she had to get the bullets into the chambers.
Four hundred feet away and to the right of Ty, a thrown pebble bounced harshly on the hard ground. Knowing it was a feint, Ty fired in that direction anyway, then turned quickly toward the position of the first attacker.
Come and get it, he urged silently.
As he had hoped, the first renegade assumed he was facing an enemy armed with a single-shot rifle. The Indian broke cover and stood up, striving for a clean shot before his prey could reload or find better cover. Smoke puffed from Ty’s carbine and the renegade died before he could even realize what had gone wrong.
Ty levered another bullet into the firing chamber even as he whipped around to confront the second renegade, who had had time to reload and was taking aim. Ty threw himself to the side, spoiling both his own shot and the renegade’s. Ty’s second and third shots were dead on target. He rolled to a new position of cover and waited.
No more shots came.
Either the other renegades hadn’t had time to take position yet or the speed with which Ty could “reload” and fire his carbine had made them cautious.
“Janna,” Ty called. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Her voice was oddly thinned but strong.
“Tell me when you’ve reloaded.”
Swearing shockingly, she worked at the unfamiliar task of putting cold, slippery bullets into the warm cylinder. She dropped two bullets before she managed to get all six chambers full. Cocking the revolv
er, she looked out over the land once more.
“Ready,” she called.
“I’m coming in from your right.”
“Go!”
An instant later Ty was on his feet and running toward the slot, dodging and turning every few seconds, doing everything he could to spoil a hunter’s aim.
Janna’s gray eyes scanned the countryside to the left of the slot, alert for any sign of movement. At the edge of her side vision she watched Ty’s long-legged stride eat up the distance between himself and safety.
Only twenty yards to cover. Then ten, then—
There was no time to warn Ty, no time to aim, no time to do anything but fire at almost point-blank range as a renegade sprang from cover just outside the cleft and came at Janna with a knife. Her first shot was wild. Her second shot hit the renegade’s shoulder a glancing blow, knocking him backward. The third and fourth shots were Ty’s. No more were needed.
“Get back,” Ty said harshly, dragging Janna farther inside the cleft. “There are three more out there and God knows how many will come in at the sound of the shots.”
Breathing hard, he shrugged out of his backpack and took up a position just inside the slot. He began refilling the carbine with quick, sure motions. As he worked he looked up every few instants to scan the landscape. What he saw made him swear tonelessly. There was a distant swirl of dust, which was probably a rider going off for reinforcements. One of the remaining renegades was taking up a position that would cover the mouth of the cleft.
The second Indian wasn’t in sight, but he was within rifle range, as a screaming, whining, ricocheting bullet proved. Rock chips exploded, showering Ty with dust and stinging shards.
“Get farther back,” he yelled as he blinked his eyes and took aim.