Bed of Roses (43 page)

But before he reached Gus, he stopped and pondered the situation.
This
Indian woman was injured badly. She might not even live long enough to give birth. And even if she did, she was in no shape to care for the babe.

He turned slowly and saw she was on her hands and knees, crawling toward a tree. When she reached it, she pulled the bottom of her buckskin skirt up to her mouth and kept it hiked up by holding it between her teeth. Still on her knees, she hugged the tree trunk and groaned, her face tight with exertion.

Sterling saw blood everywhere. It flowed from her breast down to her legs, mingling with what he assumed to be birthing blood. His trepidation immediately gave way to compassion, and he charged back toward her. “I don’t know what to do! Your wound—What if you don’t live long enough to show me what to do?
Qui hago?
”

Even if she had understood, he knew she couldn’t have answered him. He saw that as she was bringing a new life into the world, her own was slipping away from her. Her eyes were dazed, her breath was becoming shallow, and her skin was paling rapidly. Sterling knew then that this day would be her last.

The knowledge spurred him into action. If he couldn’t keep her alive, he’d do everything he could for the child. “God, don’t take her yet,” he half-implored, half-commanded. “Let me save the baby. Let her see her baby!”

He threw a beseeching look at the sky, and then, kneeling beside the woman, he reached out and spread her knees further apart, encouraging her loudly when she bore down with a contraction. She seemed to understand what he was trying to do for her and smiled at him weakly before another pain gripped her. Sterling wiped his hands on his shirt in an effort to clean them just before the crown of the infant’s head appeared.

He experienced a moment of panic when he wondered just how fast the baby would be born. After all, the mother was in an upright position on her knees, and she was pushing with every ounce of strength she possessed. To Sterling’s way of thinking, the infant might very well be expelled as fast as a bullet. The muscles in his arms hardened with readiness. No matter how fast this baby came shooting out, he wasn’t going to let it hit the ground.

But the baby’s head slipped slowly and gently into his warm palms. Sterling stared in awe at the tiny face cradled in his hands and then tensed again when the Indian woman moaned with another pain. Briefly he wondered if he was supposed to pull on the infant’s head a bit. It made sense. The mother would push, he’d pull, and out would pop the baby.

He gave a token tug. No sooner had he done it than a surge of panic tore through him. What if he pulled the head off? The thought horrified him. “You
must
do this by yourself, lady. Just slow down some.
Dios mio
,
don’t push too hard.”

In answer, she groaned louder and squeezed out her baby’s shoulders. Immediately afterward the rest of the infant slipped into Sterling’s strong arms. He held the newborn girl and shuddered in amazement that such a tiny thing could scream so loudly. One arm holding the baby, he used his other to help the mother lie on the ground and then laid the infant on her bloody breast. The child quieted immediately. Sterling watched in confusion as the woman began tugging at a leather string around her neck. Realizing she wished to remove it, he assisted her with the task and noticed the rawhide string held some sort of strange wooden amulet. Her fingers shaking, the woman slipped the necklace around her daughter and then pulled the baby closer to her face.

“She’s real pretty.” Sterling said lamely, and felt a great tug at his heart when he saw how much closer to death the woman was. “Real little and soft…she’s got a lot of hair. She’s real pretty.” He tried to smile but couldn’t get his lips to do much more than quiver.

The woman reached up and placed her trembling hand against his cheek. She kept it there for as long as her strength would allow and returned his smile with a weak one of her own. Then, a tear at the corner of her eye, her pale lips pressed against her daughter’s tiny ear, she sighed her last breath.

Sterling sat there for many moments before he reached for his knife and cut the umbilical cord. Since he’d had to leave most of his belongings in the settlement he’d just left, he had nothing at all that could be considered a swaddling cloth, and his saddle blanket was filthy. His shirt would have to do. He took it off and wrapped the baby in it. Gently, he laid her on a soft bed of leaves and set to work digging her mother’s grave.

When the woman was buried, he remembered hearing Father Tom say once that the Apaches were a religious people. Sterling didn’t know who their god was, but far be it from him to deprive this courageous woman of some holy words at her funeral. He tried to recall the Lord’s Prayer.

“Our Father, Who are allowed in heaven, Howard be Thy name…” He shuffled his feet in the dirt, ashamed he couldn’t remember any more than that and cursing the fact that he’d rarely paid attention in his religion classes at the orphanage.

He decided to try once more. “Our Father, Howard be Thy name. Thy will is against all temptations. Give us some bread when You lead us to deliver trespasses in Thy kingdom…on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.”

He raised his eyes to that special place in the sky and asked the Almighty to forgive him for botching the prayer. Sure that God complied, his guilt disappeared.

But the Indian baby did not. She was howling like a coyote, and Sterling had no earthly idea what he was supposed
to
do with her.

But he
did
know Cochise would be looking for the mother.

Hell, for that matter, she could have been the chief’s wife...or worse, his
daughter.
Taking into account his past troubles with fathers, Sterling was almost certain the dead woman really was the fearsome chief’s daughter. And it was more than likely that the whole tribe of Chiricahua Apache warriors was tracking her down. If they found him with the baby, there was very little chance they’d wait patiently for him to explain the truth of the matter. They’d find the freshly dug grave, dig it up for proof, see the woman’s fatal wound, and make a human sieve of him.

He had to get out of here fast. There wasn’t anything or anyone in the world who could escape Cochise and his warriors. Gathering the shrieking infant in his arms, he mounted awkwardly and urged Gus into a full gallop.

As he leaned over the saddle, the infant girl tucked securely in the crook of his arm, he was more convinced than ever that females were nothing but trouble.

“S
pirits hither…spirits thither,” Chimera
whispered in her spookiest manner. “Find my hero and bring him—bring him…yither? Zither?”

Her raven hair covered by an equally black hat, she stirred the potion slowly, her fingers turning white around the stick, and hoped fervently that her invented incantation would work as well as the one that had been obliterated from her ancient book of witchcraft. Everything depended on this spell.

She needed a man—the one about whom she’d fantasized for so long—and the time had come to release her knight from fantasy and bring him to reality. The spell that would bring about that transformation
had
to work.

“It made sense, and it rhymed,” she reassured herself as she leaned over the pot and watched the liquid bubble. Rising steam heated and moistened her cheeks; sweat beads dotted her forehead. She tried to wipe them off before they dripped into the boiling brew in the huge black caldron, but a few drops splashed into it. The recipe didn’t call for salt, but there was little she could do about it now.

“Wonderful,” she muttered, and threw her hat to the cabin floor. “The most important potion I’ve ever attempted and I have to go and sweat in it!”

“I brought you the biggest grub I could find,” a young boy said as he hobbled into the cabin and placed a squirming object in her palm. “But I still don’t understand how a cooked grub will conjure up your knight. Besides that, you need more than one man. Maybe if you multiplied all the ingredients you could get an army. Everett Sprague won’t be intimidated by only one—”

“He won’t be a plain, ordinary man, Archibald. The one I get will be a mighty champion! A true hero!” Chimera informed him confidently, and looked down at the wriggling thing in her hand. Pity coursed through her. Why couldn’t witches make brews without having to kill things? Her eyes slid from the grub to the boiling mixture she was still stirring with her other hand. Would the grub die instantly, or would it suffer first?

It was such a healthy grub. Fat, moist, and still covered with bits of Arizona Territory. She examined it more closely and could have sworn she saw tiny grub tears on its tiny grub face. “Couldn’t you have found a grub already on its last legs, Archibald? Killing one like that would be like putting it out of its misery.”

He grinned at her and pushed a lock of his yellow hair out of his eyes. “I don’t know what a sick grub looks like. They all look the same to me. Want me to ask Snig, Snag, and Snug to find you a dying one?”

Snig, Snag, and Snug. The freckle-faced, redheaded triplets had been missing all morning. “Those devils would think digging up grubs was too boring a job,” she said. “Now if I asked them to bring me a basket full of live rattlesnakes…”

Archibald laughed and limped over to his small cot, where his medical books still lay open. Chimera watched him, her heart constricting as it always did when she concentrated on his misshapen leg. Poor boy. No one wanted him. No one wanted any of them.

Misfits. That’s what everyone called them. They were considered dangerous, or crazy, or both. Most folks, or at least the ones who’d been brave enough to stay here since Cochise had taken to the warpath, took great care to avoid them. No, Chimera thought with a sigh, she’d get no help from anyone but the knight the spirits would send.

She had to make this spell work. If it failed…if the man of her fantasies didn’t come… What on earth would happen to them all? She looked at the grub again and saw its tiny grub arms outstretched in a pleading gesture for mercy. Her heart turned over in her breast. “‘No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.’” Out of the corner of her eye, she looked at Archibald and waited for him to remember the quote.

Archibald thought for a moment, his blue eyes bright with concentration. “Shakespeare. The line is from
Richard III
,
right?”

She smiled with pride. “Yes, and I will not be a beast without pity,” she said firmly, and took the grub outside, the loose board on the porch groaning as she stepped on it. She dug a small hole in the ground that was kept cool by the sagging porch roof and dropped the grub inside, covering it completely.

“Well, so much for my potion. Without a grub it won’t work. Without a potion, there can be no spell, and without a spell...there will be no man.” She sat down and watched the clouds move by overhead, trying to read her future in the patterns they made, but she saw nothing except a shape that looked like a nose complete with wide nostrils.

She sighed. She’d never been good at reading the future. Tea leaves at the bottom of cups were nothing but brown mush to her, her crystal ball was only a round and empty piece of glass, and her tarot cards were merely cards with pretty pictures on them.

But she didn’t need fortune-telling devices to know that if she didn’t find a way to get a hero, hers and the boys’ futures were doomed. Somehow, and from somewhere, the knight just had to come.

“Chimera!”

Snig’s piercing yell as he emerged from the woods that surrounded the rickety cabin snapped her out of her concentration. “Snig! What have you been torturing with that thing?” she demanded, pointing to the long, jagged stick he was holding. “Did you find that spider dung I sent you and your brothers after?”

“We don’t know what the hell spider shit looks like!” Snig shouted, his freckled face flushed with exertion. “But your trap—” He ran to her and pulled her along as he raced back into the forest. “Hurry, Chimera!”

She gasped. Her werewolf trap! “I got a werewolf?” she cried, and then stopped abruptly. “Have you been torturing a werewolf?”

Snig stomped the ground impatiently. “It ain’t no werewolf! What you bagged is a man!” He turned and ran, knowing she would follow.

A man? Chimera repeated to herself. Her breath quickened. The spell! But how could the potion have worked? She hadn’t even completed the whole incantation over it, and what about the missing grub and spider dung?

She tapped her lips with her fingers. Could it be that the grub and spider dung weren’t such important ingredients after all? Had she really and truly conjured up a man? But what kind of man would let himself get caught in a werewolf snare? Certainly not a daring and courageous knight!

Her heart spiraled into the depths of her stomach. Because the spell had been only partly completed, it had only partly worked, she surmised. She’d gotten a man all right, but instead of the cunning hero she’d hoped for, she’d gotten a dolt!

“Chimera!” Snig shouted.

“Coming.” Speeding along, she wondered just how stupid the man would be.

S
terling did, indeed, realize he
looked stupid, but not as stupid as he felt. He was hanging upside down from a large tree branch, a rope firmly wrapped around his left ankle. And be was madder than hell. He was still shirtless, his chest and back pricked and scratched to the point of bleeding.