Dead Heat (36 page)

Charles was quiet for a little while, and Anna thought he’d finished the story, but he picked it up again. “So I looked down at that boy and said, ‘Are you Joseph?’ He got to his feet, dusted himself up, wiped the blood off his chin, and said, ‘Yes. I got twelve more bars to go.’ I said, ‘You need to be more careful who you get your information from. Your mom is living with her sister over near Monument Valley.’ That gave him pause. While he was still thinking, I said, ‘You need to remember one other thing. If you’re going to face someone bigger and stronger than you, kid, make damn sure you are better armed.’ I gave him my knife and sheath. We stopped to give the bartender Hosteen’s address so that Hosteen could settle the bill, because by my reckoning it was Hosteen’s pride that had caused the whole mess.”

“You used to run around with him,” Max said. “Kage said you and he got into a lot of trouble.”

“That was later,” Charles said. “Started, I suppose, when your grandfather was about seventeen. He’d run away again and was punching cows for a Navajo rancher. He and Hosteen locked horns over every little thing in those days. Hosteen asked if I’d stop and check in on him and see if I couldn’t talk him into going home. Might not have worked, but he sent me out with an Arab Hosteen had bought from a breeder in California. Joseph could resist almost anything except pretty mares.”

“That would have been in the fifties, right?” asked Max. “Why were you on horseback?”

“The ranch was out in Navajo country,” Charles said. “I don’t think there was anything with four wheels that could have made it there. I had a truck and horse trailer parked about twenty-five miles from the ranch.” He paused. “My da and I were having trouble seeing eye-to-eye about then. It gave Joseph and me something to talk about on that trip back. I didn’t go home. We worked Hosteen’s ranch until the next fight. Then Joseph and I went out on our own. Mostly working cows and increasing our cash flow with the occasional rodeo. Your granddad could ride anything with four hooves. On one memorable, almost-fatal occasion, that included a moose. I think I have a photo of that one somewhere; if I find it I’ll send you a copy.”

“That’s when he met Maggie, right?” Max said. “Granddad says he was working at her ranch.”

Charles huffed a laugh. “Her ranch was two hundred acres of the nastiest country I’ve ever tried to run cows on. It had a spring, though, pure and clean and cold at high summer. We were at the nearest town … I don’t remember the name of it, though it might come to me. Joseph and I had just finished up the fall roundup and were flush with money and time, because we’d been let go like most of the other hands after the drive. She’d come into town driving a beat-up old truck to buy supplies and ran into trouble at the store.”

“Because she was Navajo—I mean, Diné?”

Charles shook his head. “Most of the people there were Navajo—Diné if you’d prefer. No. It was that she was a woman trying to be a man. That kind of attitude about women wasn’t very Navajo, really, but it was very 1950s. Anyway, Joseph and I stepped in. Joseph being Joseph, it wasn’t long before fists were flying, and Maggie was pretty good with her fists. She was smarter than the rest of us, though, because she hiked back to her truck and pulled out her shotgun. And that was the end of that fight. We worked for her all that winter.” He looked at Anna. “Not that winter in Arizona, except for the really high country, is very cold compared to Montana. I lit out that spring, but Joseph stayed and married her. I think she still owns that patch of ground, but they moved back here after a few years when Hosteen’s dedication to the Arabians started to pay off and he really needed more help.”

“Why a moose?” Anna asked. She’d seen a few moose since moving to Montana. Even the werewolves were wary of them.

“You’d have to be male, eighteen, and trying to impress a girl to understand,” said Charles.

Max laughed. “Sixteen works,” he said.

First Anna’s phone rang and then Charles’s.

“McDermit was a fetch,” said Leslie as soon as Anna answered the phone. “I’m looking at a pile of sticks sitting in the chair where he was sitting not ten minutes ago.”

Charles, his attention caught by Leslie’s conversation, answered his own phone, and though Anna could hear the voice on the other side, she couldn’t understand a word he said.

“English,” said Charles. “My Navajo was never that good and I’ve hardly spoken it for twenty years.”

“The fae,” said Joseph, “the fae can look like anyone. She’s here.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Anna told Leslie, and ended the call.

Joseph Sani woke up feeling as though he were eighteen again. Nothing hurt. He sat up in his bed and wondered if he had died and this was what happened afterward. But his body looked like the body of an old man, and his breath was still too short.

He got up gingerly, expecting at any moment to feel as he had sitting trapped and helpless in the car. Aging, he knew, was part of living—a part of living that he’d chosen over the arguments of his father and his wife. That didn’t make the frustration of being dependent easier, he’d found.

But on his feet, his body was still obeying him as it had not in years. Not only didn’t it hurt, but he picked up a heavy potted plant that was set on the ground near the window; he had most of his old strength back.

There’s something you need to do,
Charles had said, or words almost like that.

Joseph wasn’t a particularly spiritual man. Not like Charles, his brother-by-choice, and mostly he’d been grateful for that. Men who saw the spirits had to listen to them—though Charles only listened to them when he wanted to.

But even a man who wasn’t spiritual could tell that something was up when the wear and tear of eighty-odd years of life were lifted from him: it must be time for him to do that something. Too bad he had no idea what that was.

Still, a man who was doing something ought to do it with clothes on. And an old cowboy who ought to do something would do it with his boots on. So he pulled out a pair of new jeans … and set them aside for a faded and broken-in pair. He took out a good shirt, though, that snapped up the front like any shirt that belonged to a cowboy ought to. Cowboying was hard on the hands. Any cowboy who handled ropes for very long soon had knuckles that didn’t like fussing with tiny little buttons.

After a moment’s thought, he didn’t put on a hat. This didn’t feel like something a hat would help with. He took a good look at himself in the mirror in his bathroom.

“You are old,” he told his reflection. But he didn’t feel that way. Not at all. He tightened his right hand in a fist.

He could still see the crooked finger that he’d broken when that four-year-old stallion decided to get the old Indian off his back. He hadn’t stayed off and hadn’t realized his finger was broken until twenty minutes later, when the adrenaline had worn off.

That finger had hurt for ten years, but it didn’t hurt now.

He turned away from the mirror and met the bright blue eyes of a little red-haired boy.

“The fae can look like anyone,” the boy said. “He’s coming.”

“Who are you?” Joseph asked—but the boy, who had been standing in the doorway of the bathroom, was gone.

“Chindi,”
said Joseph—though the boy hadn’t felt evil. Maybe he’d been imagining things. But he still was careful to twist around so he didn’t go through the space where the boy had stood as he walked through the doorway back into his bedroom.

He decided to go downstairs and find Charles. Charles would know … the right questions to ask, maybe. He could at least expect that Charles would believe him.

He stopped as he passed his chest of drawers and opened up the small drawer on the upper left side. And there was the old knife Charles had given him after rescuing him from a bar fight. It was a very good knife, six inches of pattern-welded steel. How good, he hadn’t realized until four or five years later when someone had tried to buy it from him for four hundred dollars. That had been at least sixty years ago. He had no idea what it might be worth now. But it was an old friend. Until very recently, he’d carried it every day of his life since the day Charles had given it to a skinny Indian kid with a chip on his shoulder.

It took him a minute to find the sheath and belt. Dressed properly, he opened his bedroom door and started down the hall. Mackie and Maggie were playing Candy Land. He could tell because Maggie exclaimed, “I get to go to Gumdrop Mountain!” while Mackie cheered her on.

That Mackie did not care whether she won or lost was not a fault of the game. Joseph thought that twenty years from now, when it was Mackie and not Kage competing in the rarefied atmosphere of the best equestrians of their generation, Mackie would still cheer on her opponents.

For a moment Joseph was deeply saddened by the thought that he would never get to witness that. But his time here was nearly past, and he really did not regret it. So much had changed, and so much had not. He was ready to go on to—how did Peter Pan put it?
An awfully big adventure.

“I wanted to stay with you, Grandma,” Mackie was saying. “But I’m worried about Michael. Nix is too tired to ride and Michael is very little. Who do you think he’s riding today?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “Max knows the horses who will be good for Michael. One purple. Your turn.”

“Orange,” said Mackie. “Do you think Anna will buy Merrylegs? I like Merrylegs.”

Evidently Max had taken his brother, Charles, and Anna out riding, Joseph thought.

“I hope she buys Hephzibah,” said Maggie. Joseph, unseen, still in the hall above the stairs, grinned. Mackie might not care about winning or losing, but her grandmother certainly did. If Anna had been what she had at first appeared, a too-young, too-innocent weakling, Maggie would have pitied her. But she would have taken her under her wing, too, and tried to teach her how to deal with strong-minded men.

But Anna was, in her own way, as strong-minded as Maggie. The two of them would never have been able to be friends. Maggie would always view her as competition. That Anna had Mackie’s appreciation of competition, except where Charles was concerned, didn’t make Maggie like her any better.

“Hephzibah is pretty,” said Mackie in a doubtful voice. “But Daddy calls her Hellbitch. I don’t think Anna should buy a horse called Hellbitch, do you? It’s okay, though. Max will help Anna find the right horse. Two reds. It’s your turn.”

A car drove up outside. Joseph, who had taken a step forward, hesitated. He backed up a few feet and went into one of the guest bedrooms that overlooked the parking area. The car wasn’t one of theirs, and it wasn’t one he knew.

He knew the woman who got out of it, though. Why was the owner, she could call herself a principal if she wanted to, of Michael and Mackie’s day care showing up at their door?

The hair on the back of his neck stood up suddenly.

She’s here.
The soundless whisper was hot in his ear.

He knew that the feds had the person they thought had hexed Chelsea and killed all those kids. He also knew that Charles hadn’t been convinced.

If he knew his father, and he did, Hosteen would have wolves watching the place. So why hadn’t they stopped her? A fae can look like anyone. Maybe he could look like a woman, like the principal of Mackie’s day care. Instinctive certainty gripped him, and Joseph had learned to pay attention to his instincts. The woman approaching the house was the fae who’d tried to kill his grandchildren.

Charles had told him that this fae had taken down a werewolf—Joseph remembered Archibald Vaughn. He’d been a big, mean, scary old wolf, and this fae had torn him apart. One old Indian wasn’t going to stop him very easily.

There was a phone in the bedroom. He picked up the receiver and dialed Charles’s cell phone. As soon as Charles picked up, he told him what was going on.

The doorbell rang as Charles said, “English. My Navajo was never that good and I’ve hardly spoken it for twenty years.”

Downstairs Maggie got up and went to the door. How well did the fae hear? Were they like his father?

“The fae,” said Joseph in an urgent whisper, “the fae can look like anyone. She’s here.” And then he had to hang up because the door opened.

If she was here for Mackie, she would want to take her away from the ranch. One of the things that living with werewolves had taught him was that just because someone was supernatural didn’t mean that cars didn’t make getaways faster.

He pulled off his boots and ran stocking-footed down the hall to the other end of the house. He slipped out the window, dropped onto the back porch roof, and slid off as far as he could before jumping to the ground, hoping that his rejuvenation would keep him from breaking his knees on the landing. When he was eighteen he’d have thought nothing of making such a drop.

He was almost surprised to land on his feet. He ran to the cars and pulled his knife. He sank the blade into one tire of every car in the lot. Maybe Hosteen’s people would see him. But usually Hosteen didn’t like guards that close to the house. They were probably out by the main road somewhere.

If he’d had a cell phone, he could call his father and alert him. He could have called him from the house instead of Charles. But Charles was closer … and Charles had a better chance of coming out on top. His father was tough, but Charles … was
Charles
.

It took him less than a minute to disable the cars and the pair of four-wheelers—buying time for Charles to return and save Mackie. The knife had a real sharp edge; Charles had taught him how to sharpen it.

No getaway car. What would the fae do?

Kill Maggie.

His heart clenched and his teeth bared in a silent growl. The fae didn’t need her, didn’t want her, and his Maggie wouldn’t let anyone take Mackie without a fight.

He faced the fact that the fate of the woman he had loved for over half a century was entirely out of his hands. All he could do was go into that house and die beside her.

He’d do that willingly, except for Mackie.

There was nothing he could do to affect Maggie’s fate. Live or die, she would do it without him. He swallowed hard. Maggie would be happy to die if it gave someone a chance to save Mackie.