Masked Cowboy (Men of the White Sandy) (23 page)

Whoa
. Mary Beth knew she was blushing, but boy, that compliment had just flowed out of his mouth. She shot a look at Jacob, hoping he was taking notes on this. He looked…pissed. At least he’d noticed. “Thank you.”

“
Lé wičhíŋčala kiŋ hé é he?
” Rebel took a step closer to Kip. This time though, Jacob didn’t block his path. Kip seemed to lean into Mary Beth a little more.

Jacob noncommittally shrugged.

“
T
h
akóža, ačhíp
h
e-he ló
,” Rebel said. He didn’t pretend she was a grown up and hold out a hand, nor did he go for the condescending pat on the head. He just stood there, waiting.

Mary Beth felt Kip’s body tense. Did the little girl speak Lakota? She knew Jacob did—but it had never occurred to her that Kip spoke Lakota. Heck, she didn’t even technically speak English. She just didn’t speak.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” A woman—a white woman in a lab coat—appeared behind Rebel. Her curly blonde hair was barely contained by a bun. “How many times—” She pulled up short when she saw them. “Oh.” Her hands flew to her hair, smoothing it back as she glanced from the cowboy in the mask to the woman holding an albino child. She made eye contact with Mary Beth and managed a small, nervous smile before her hands dropped to her sides. “Hello. I’m Dr. Madeline Mitchell.”

“Dr. Mary Beth Hofstetter, large animal vet. I’d shake but…”

Dr. Mitchell smiled with understanding.

“And this is Jacob Plenty Holes.” If anything, Rebel seemed amused at Dr. Mitchell’s confusion. “My
the
čhí
h
ila
, Madeline.”

“Wait—what does that mean?” Mary Beth asked Rebel, but she looked at Jacob. He’d said that to her, a couple of times now.

“My love,” Rebel said, with a long, lingering look at Dr. Mitchell. “I love you.”

Jacob didn’t move. She wasn’t sure he was breathing. She knew she wasn’t. Was that was he was saying to her? Was that what he really
meant
?

Dr. Mitchell cleared her throat. A bit of color came to her cheeks but otherwise, she showed no other sign of being embarrassed by this announcement. Instead, she was staring at Jacob.

Mary Beth could tell Jacob was not a big fan of this new development. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that Jacob had taken Clarence’s warning about somebody—Nobody?—being afraid of the new doctor to heart. “Ma’am,” he got out, sounding like Dr. Mitchell had made straight for his incisors with a hack saw.

Still grinning, Rebel carried on with his introductions. “And this is Kip—is it Two Elks or Plenty Holes now?”

Anything pained about Jacob was gone in an instant, buried beneath a glare so dangerous that a lesser man would have had the good sense to take cover—or at least protect his nuts.

Mary Beth looked down at Kip, whose eyes were shut. But her grip on Mary Beth was too tight for her to be asleep. Two Elks? Was that her last name?

“This is Kip,” Rebel finally said into the agonizing silence. “She has an appointment.”

“Come on back,” Dr. Mitchell said. “What brings you in today?”

Mary Beth waited for Jacob to say something, but he had apparently decided he was done talking for the time being. So she took over. “I don’t think she’s had a checkup in three years and I’m worried about her eyes.”

Dr. Mitchell nodded. “Look up, sweetie.”

Kip didn’t move.

Mary Beth felt stupid, which translated into her glaring at Jacob. “Oh, and I doubt she’s spoken a word in three years. Her teacher thinks she’s severely autistic.”

Dr. Mitchell’s mouth curved into a frown, but she didn’t miss a beat. “I see. That rules out the vision chart then.” Moving slowly, she tilted Kip’s head back. “I’m just going to shine a light in your eyes, okay, sweetie? Nothing bad. Just a little bright light.”

The exam continued. Dr. Mitchell asked questions, Mary Beth did her best to answer them on behalf of Jacob. Which was to say, she had almost no answers. What the hell was wrong with that man?

“And you?” Dr. Mitchell turned to Jacob, clearly not intimidated by his best intimidation.

For a man with only one eye, he packed a lot of punch into that glare.

Dr. Mitchell stuck her hands on her hips and met Jacob’s glare with a look that Mary Beth could only call a sneer. “I’m going to assume you haven’t followed up on your injury either. Are you having any problems, either with vision or breathing?”

Rebel had the nerve to chuckle, but Mary Beth could see why anyone would be afraid of the doctor. “Easy, Madeline.” He turned to Jacob. “This is usually the part where she tells you that you should be seeing a therapist and have Kip enrolled in a special school and all that stuff.”

Dr. Mitchell huffed at him. “And this is usually the part where you tell everyone to go to a sweat lodge.”

They seemed to be having an argument—a familiar argument—but underneath, Mary Beth could sense an affectionate current.

Rebel turned back to Kip. “Three years, huh?”

Jacob nodded. At least, Mary Beth thought he did. Hell, at this point, she couldn’t even be sure he was breathing.

Rebel crouched down in front of Kip and looked her in the eyes. Everything seemed to slow down as the two of them stared at each other. At some point, Mary Beth noticed that Rebel’s eyes had gone surprisingly blank and he seemed to be wavering where he stood. His wife noticed too, and steadied him.

What the hell? It was as if the man had slipped into a catatonic state or something.

Unexpectedly, Rebel shook back awake. In the process, he lost his balance and wound up on his butt on the floor. He drew his knees up and stuck his head between them as Dr. Mitchell rubbed his back. “It’ll pass in a minute,” she reassured them. “It always does.”

Kip didn’t move, didn’t even blink, but Mary Beth got the feeling she was…nervous about this whole thing. She scooted up on the table next to the girl and looped her arm around Kip’s thin shoulders. “It’s okay, honey,” she said in a quiet tone, but she couldn’t tell if she was reassuring Kip or herself.

Finally—although it probably only was a minute—Rebel sat up and moved into a cross-legged pose. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” It was the first thing Jacob had said in close to half an hour.

“Nothing. Either she’s buried everything deeper than I can see it or…”

“
Or
?”

“Or she doesn’t have the gift.”

This pronouncement settled over the clinic. Then, without warning, Jacob exploded. “
Doesn’t have the gift
? Are you kidding me? But if she doesn’t have the gift—if it’s just not
there
—then why the hell would anyone have come after her and her parents? Why the hell would they have done—” He was in such a state that all he could do was wave at his mask. “
Why
?”

Rebel remained calm. “For the same reason that you protect her, Jacob. She doesn’t have to be holy to be special.” He reached up and patted Kip’s foot. “It will be all right, little one.”

That shut Jacob up. Dr. Mitchell looked at Mary Beth, the only person in the room to realize how confused she was. “Rebel can see,” she said, as if that explained everything. “If you can believe it.”

If you believe
. Jacob had told her that once. Looked like now was as good a time as any to start believing.

Then a voice spoke from near the waiting room. “So.” A massive man seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

Muscles
was all Mary Beth could think, followed closely by
scars
.
Lots of scars
. The man was, hands down, the scariest person she’d seen in the flesh in a long time—and that was including Buck McGillis. Instinctively, she threw her arm around Kip’s shoulders and leaned forward, trying to shield the little girl with her body.

No one else in the room moved. Hell, no one else even seemed disturbed by this brute of a guy. If anything, she thought Jacob might be…smiling?

The guy looked around the room without actually looking at her. She braced herself for the worst—would he pull a gun or what?

He didn’t. He just said, “You called.”

Chapter Fourteen

Jacob sat in a chair in the waiting room. Mary Beth was in the chair next to him and Kip was spread out over both of their laps, fast asleep. Rebel was sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning back against his wife’s legs. She’d pulled the desk chair around to the side but she kept a hand on the desk, fingers drumming.

Nobody was, for lack of a better term, mopping the clinic. Jacob watched him. It wasn’t the first time he’d cleaned the place, that much was obvious. Didn’t make any sense.

“After Albert died,” Rebel explained, “Nobody helped out.”

“He did a good job staying on top of things during the outbreak,” Madeline added.

Jacob snuck a look at Mary Beth, who did not look mollified by these ringing endorsements. When he’d introduced Mary Beth to Nobody, they’d both managed a polite nod. Jacob could see Mary Beth trying to form the words. God only knew what she’d come up with. So far though—nothing. Odd as that was.

Rebel was telling him everything he knew about the rancher. “I went out with Nobody the second time, but by the time we got there, wasn’t much but the stink and some stains. I took some samples—”

“And I got them processed,” Madeline added, fingers still tapping. At first, Jacob thought it was because she was nervous, but nothing about her said she was uncomfortable. Instead, he got the feeling that she was sitting in judgment of him.

Damn, no wonder Clarence had tried to warn him about Dr. Mitchell. For a second, he’d expected her take the mask off herself and start examining him. No wonder Nobody seemed cowed by her—as cowed as Nobody ever got anyway.

He asked the question he didn’t want to ask—but that’s why they were all here, wasn’t it? “Have you
seen
anything?” Anything beyond Kip not inheriting her grandmother’s gifts. Jacob still couldn’t get his head around it. He’d assumed that between being Joy Clear Water’s granddaughter and the whole albino thing, Kip had to be a holy woman. Clearly, Susan had assumed the same thing. As had whoever had come after her.

And they’d all be wrong.

Jacob looked at the little girl whose feet were in his lap. Mary Beth was stroking her hair with one hand and had her other one looped around the girl’s waist, holding her on their laps.
Still special
, he thought. That was what he had to remember.

Rebel looked lost in thought, making Jacob wonder if he was about to slip off into another vision thing. But then Rebel sighed. “I have seen something. Understand the past, understand the future.”

Beside him, Mary Beth startled—not enough to be rude, but enough that he could feel it. “Is that like ‘those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it’?”

Rebel favored her with a kind smile, which made Jacob want to punch him in the teeth. “Do you know what the Sun Dance is?”

“A what?”

Madeline cut in. “They erect a pole, tie a rope to the top and attach bear claws or bones to the other end. Then the medicine man—” she looked at Rebel, “—will pierce a young warrior’s skin and thread the claw or bone through it. The warrior then dances around the pole until he pulls the claw or bone free.”

“We do it for a good reason,” Rebel said quietly.

“It’s not my favorite thing,” Madeline said, more to Mary Beth than to her husband. “Messy to suture. Big scars.”

“Scars are a thing to be proud of,” Rebel insisted, a little louder.

“You’re…you’re serious? You rip holes in your chest?” She looked at Rebel’s shirt. “Seriously?”

“It symbolizes a warrior’s sacrifice to their family and their tribe.” Then Rebel’s tone changed, slipping more back into an argumentative tone. “And I haven’t done it. I only performed the ceremony once, at a warrior’s request before he shipped out to Afghanistan.”

“Still messy to suture,” Madeline grumbled.

“The vision,” Jacob prodded them. He could feel Mary Beth’s eyes on his chest as well. “I haven’t done it either,” he added under his breath.

“Right. In the vision, a warrior is tethered to the pole and he dances. He is tired and he wants to fall down—to pull free and accept his scars for his tribe—but there is a shadow. A
shadow
,” he repeated in a quiet tone, like he hadn’t figured that part out yet. “And this shadow, it won’t let him fall. It blocks out the light, hiding the warrior. The warrior, he dances and dances but he can’t break free as long as the shadow is watching. He cannot finish.”

The weight of these words settled over the room. Even Nobody stopped cleaning and came to stand in the doorway that separated the waiting room from the rest of the building.

Accept his scars for his tribe
. Jacob felt gut-punched by these words. How much longer would he wear the mask? Hide the girl? Be alone? He knew the answer, of course. There wasn’t any doubt about it.

For as long as it took. That was that. That was all it had ever been.

Mary Beth reached over and took Jacob’s hand in hers. It was light, warm—real. She was really here. Kip was here. Hell,
he
was here and that was something. Rebel’s little vision was just that—a vision. Nothing he could touch with his hands. Nothing he could measure or plan for or work with. Nothing he could make sense of. None of it.