The Hex Witch of Seldom (9 page)

“Bastards,” Bobbi said furiously to the world at large. “Pigs. Some people don't deserve to live.” She was not frightened, not on Shane, but she knew that if she had been riding a horse that really was a horse she would have been in serious trouble. The thought made her outraged. “Shitheads,” she declared.

She heard the mutter of their engines fading away. Then she heard it grow louder again. They were coming back.

“I don't
believe
this!”

The first one pulled his bike up beside her and stayed there. She felt all Shane's muscles harden under her, but the horse kept walking.

“Hey, girlie! Where'dja learn to ride?”

There were yips from the other bikers to show that this was meant as mockery. The man had placed a leering slur on “ride.” Bobbi looked down at her questioner with distaste, seeing the things he wore to mark what he wanted to be: boots, leather vest, earrings, tattoos, dirty hair stringing back from his unhelmeted head. Seeing also the marks of what he really was: graying strands in his scraggle of beard. Flab bulging above his belt, though muscles bulged in his arms. No form behind the form. This man was like a flat thing, all surface, nothing beyond. She wondered briefly where he had misplaced his soul.

“Get lost,” she said.

“Hey, tell ya what! Get down off that horse a minute. C'mere. I'll give you a real ride.” He laughed smuttily, and so did his friends.

It had not occurred to Bobbi yet to look frightened. She hadn't reckoned on the way these bikers would react to her, a teenage girl out on a black horse that was walking along without saddle or bridle or even a halter, and neither horse nor girl acting scared.

“Stuff it,” she said.

The man made a grab at her leg, trying to pull her off Shane.

Bobbi reacted quickly, swinging her booted foot to knock the man away. But Shane was even quicker than she. Before her boot could connect with its target, Shane whirled and let fly at man and motorcycle with both hind feet. There was a crash as bike and biker landed in the dirt. Bobbi heard, but didn't see, for Shane had stretched out into a gallop.

And she heard the buzz as the bikers came after her. And she knew not even Shane could outrun them on the road.

Even as she thought of it, she felt Shane gather himself, and she grabbed at his mane with both hands. Three junked cars hulked beside the road at a curve, coming up fast. Shane cleared the middle one in a long, strong jump—Bobbi winced, feeling her stomach flip. She was not used to jumping anything bigger than a fallen log on the trail. She'd been coon hunting on a mule that would leap a barbed-wire fence, but her job then was to get off first, duck through the wire, drape her jacket over the top strand and clear the terrain on the other side.… No telling what sort of rock or sharp metal might be on the other side of this junker. But Shane landed in weeds and was off at a hard gallop. He knew what sort of men these bikers were. He knew they would find a way around the abandoned cars and be after him quicker than they could curse.

At reckless speed Shane snaked through the woods, taking a twisting way between close-spaced saplings and giant oaks, crashing through brush, jumping rocks and fallen trees, trying to throw the bikers off. Bobbi flattened herself over his neck and shielded her eyes against branches with one hand. Behind her she heard yells much like the yelps of hunting dogs. Wheels spun, engines whined. The bikers were enjoying the chase. They liked tearing up the forest with their tires. They enjoyed destroying things. If they caught her, they would enjoy the—what? The kill?

The bikers roared closer. Bobbi recognized the shouting voice of the biker who had wanted to give her a ride.

“Tight ass!”

She did not look at him or reply.

“Bitch, you wait! I'll show you a couple things.”

“Damn,” Bobbi muttered into Shane's mane. She was beginning to feel frightened, though not for herself. She knew Shane too well for that. Not only the black stallion Shane, but the man, or more-than-man, the legend. She had lived with it almost since she was born, in her dreams, in the stories she read for school, in a hundred TV shows, even before she had met Shane in her father's notebook. She knew what was likely to happen, and it frightened her. What was sure to happen, if the bikers left Shane no choice.

They were fanning out to either side of the black mustang, finding themselves easier terrain than what he chose for them, catching up with him. Soon they would try to cut him off.

A thick fallen tree blocked the way. Shane leaped across; the bikers veered around. Then—

“Shane!” Bobbi gasped aloud.

A rocky ravine a good twenty feet deep sheered down at their feet.

There was no time to stop. There might have been time to turn aside, to skid slantwise down the steep slope or run along the edge, easily brought to bay either way. Shane had no intention of doing either. Even clinging to his neck as she was, Bobbi felt the powerful spring of his hindquarters, and it seemed to propel all the breath out of her. With an energy, a focus, a concentrated force like nothing she had ever felt in man or stallion before, Shane leaped toward the far side of the ravine. But it was a crazy leap; Shane had to be crazy. No horse could jump so far—

Too scared to scream, Bobbi hid her face in black mane. Shane had carried her into midair, with nothing but his body between her and the rocks below, and the curve of his leap flew forward into nothing, and he and Bobbi were falling, falling—

Shane's reaching forefeet struck about halfway down the opposite bank. His hooves dug in, his forelegs curled like the arms of a fighter landing a punch, his shoulder muscles bulged, and he surged upward. His hind hooves grabbed. Hindquarters bunched, then sprang. Bobbi's hands tightened around the base of his neck, feeling the sweat break out on Shane's chest as he brought her up the side of the ravine and over its lip to the more level floor of the forest.

Without even a pause to catch his breath, Shane galloped on. Bobbi moved her hands to his mane, raised her head and stole a glance behind her. Even before she looked, she heard the waspish buzz of motors and knew. The bikers had found a way through or over the ravine. They would run Shane until he dropped.

Shane dug in his forefeet, slid to a stop and whirled.

Bobbi understood. He frightened her, but she understood. She sat straight on his back, sharing his defiance. Shane had given these men every opportunity to give up, go their own way and let him be. He had tried to spare their lives in every way he knew. He had run from them as long as he was going to run. Now it was showdown time.

Shane stood squared off and rock firm, neck arched but low, head extended in a stallion's threat gesture. The warning was clear. This was to be a duel to the death.

The bikers understood as well as Bobbi did. Engines faltered, cycles muttered to a stop. At a safe distance the three of them sat their mechanical mounts, eyeing Shane.

“You stupid no-neck fugheads!” Bobbi yelled. “Go away, or you're going to get killed!” Her voice shook on the last word. She did not like what was happening any better than she liked the men who had been pursuing her.

The one who had tried to grab her pulled a knife from a sheath at his belt. His face, Bobbi noted, was sweating above his graying scraggle of beard. “Come on!” he ordered the others. “The horse is wore out. Let's get her!”

“You get her,” the man next to him retorted.

Even from the distance Bobbi saw the flush of anger redden the first biker's face. “Christ!” he yelled. “You scared of a girl on a
horse
?”

“That ain't no horse,” the third man said in a low voice. “Look at its eyes.”

“Jesus shit!” The one with the knife didn't look. He spoke with the scorn of a frightened man who won't acknowledge his own fear. “All right, you two scumbags watch. I'll show you how it's done. I'm going to kill that horse. And then I'm going to lay that tight-assed bitch, and you two dickless wonders don't get a piece of her.”

He revved his cycle and roared toward Shane.

The black mustang waited until his enemy had gained some speed. Then Shane also sprang forward into a driving gallop. The biker saw him coming, spun his cycle sideways and lifted his knife. He meant to slash as Shane charged past him. But Shane was quicker than any dodge or any knife. He lifted into a low rear. One deadly hoof struck the man's uplifted hand, sending the knife flying. The other smashed into the man's head.

Bobbi shut her eyes.

She heard the motorcycle fall and lie sputtering in the dirt. With momentum still carrying him forward, Shane cleared it and the body in one leap. It took him a few strides to come to a stop.

Bobbi looked at the other two bikers. Close in front of her, they sat without moving, white-faced, their eyes staring. They would not hurt her.

Shane turned and left that place at an easy lope, knowing that only silence would follow.

Bobbi's fingers twisted and clenched in his mane as she rode. Her insides felt sick. She had seen dead bodies enough in her sixteen years, rouged and laid out amid flowers in funeral homes, but she had never seen a man killed before. She tried not to think of the smashed-pumpkin sound his head had made, or of the color pink. Instead, she thought of what he had meant to do to her, and felt at the same time better and worse.

She noticed that Shane was making his way through woods again instead of taking one of the many logging roads and snowmobile trails. The black mustang was keeping to the densest cover.

“Right,” she said aloud in a hoarse voice. If she and Shane had been fugitives before, they were doubly fugitives now. The police would want to know who had killed that biker, and how. Maybe the man had belonged to a motorcycle gang, the Pagans or the Hell's Angels, and the gang might come after them.

“I bet even the blasted federal government is after us,” she said to Shane, “because you're a mustang.”

She felt badly shaken, and reached out to Shane without thinking. A scared horseman always moves to calm his horse. She stroked Shane's neck. She reached up and laid her hand on the white scars of his brand, and Shane did not pull away.

Chapter Seven

Shane nosed her awake in the middle of the night.

Sleepily stirring in her nest of dead leaves and hemlock boughs, Bobbi did not at first know where she was. She dreamed that the touch was Grandpap's, that Pap was shaking her to awaken her before dawn for a day's hunting. Then she shivered and woke up, and there was the black form of Shane standing over her, looming in the chilly night.

“What is it?” Bobbi asked groggily, too sleepy to show surprise that the black horse had touched her of his own accord. Just as well, she knew later, thinking back on the moment, that the night was dark and that she was too numbed by sleep to feel much. Shane would not have wanted to see the flush of joy on her face.

She sat up without waiting for an answer. There could have been one from Shane's eerie eyes, but she did not want that, and instinct told her such answers were not for the small questions. She listened and looked around for her own answer. There was no sense of danger in the night. Shane stood by her, waiting.

“You want to go on? Now?”

It would have been better to go on in the daytime, when Bobbi could see what she was doing. But she got up, flexed her aching body and scattered her bed, hiding her traces as best she could in the dark.

“I guess you have your reasons,” she said.

Shane stood by a log, making it easier for her to get on him. He kept to a walk through the woods, over the uneven and unseen ground, and Bobbi laid her head down on his neck, closing her eyes and covering them with one hand to protect them from branches.

After a while she began to hear distant traffic noise. The rumble of trucks carried clearly on the night air. She sat up and looked at the headlights strobe-flickering through the trees. Traffic was light at the time of night, but she could tell it was a big highway. A four-lane.

“You knew this was here,” she said to Shane in amazement. “But how—no. I won't even ask.”

After a moment she added, “I take it we have to cross.” Shane had brought her to the expressway in the dead of night, when it was least likely they would be seen.

Steep embankments topped with chain-link fence flanked the highway, making it a ravine that not even Shane could leap. After a moment's pause he turned leftward, picking his way along the top of the bank, just behind the fence. It was unlikely that anyone would see a girl in dark jacket and jeans riding a black horse up there in the black of night.

Bobbi kept silent, wincing each time headlights swept over her, or seemed to. She could not think how they were going to cross. Even if they could get through the fence, sheer rock fell below.

She felt Shane's head come up. He was looking at something ahead.

“We're in luck,” Bobbi breathed. In the headlights she could see the concrete span of a bridge crossing the highway. Better yet, no neon signs glared. No gas stations, no fast-food huts.

As Shane walked closer, Bobbi could see why. A small secondary road overpassed the four-lane, with no access. No cloverleaf. No exits. The chain-link fence curved toward the bridge and joined with its railing. The narrow blacktop ran through woods, over the highway, and into woods again. At the time of night, traffic on it would be nearly nil. For two fugitives, it couldn't have been a better bridge.

Shane stopped to study it.

“Go for it!” Bobbi whispered to him excitedly.

He tossed his head in annoyance and did not move. In a moment Bobbi understood that Shane was waiting for the traffic to clear on the highway. It was a slim risk, that somebody passing under the bridge might notice the dark horse and rider overhead, but it was a risk he did not want to take.

For what seemed a long time, but might not have been more than five minutes, girl and horse-man waited. Bobbi felt herself grow tense with impatience, felt Shane's body between her legs filling with tension of the same sort. At last she felt him bunch for his run. Another moment and the sky over the highway would be dark … it was. Shane burst from a standstill into a canter and clattered onto the bridge, running for the other side …