Heart of the Hawk (6 page)

After a moment, he reached out and turned the heavy inner page over, to be confronted only with a blank sheet of the heavy, gilt-edged paper. He turned it as well, looking for the title page. Or what should have been the title page. Instead he found a picture of a couple dressed oddly in clothing that for some reason made him think of the tales his mother had read to him of a faraway land with misty forests, castles, and high stone walls.

He stared at the picture. A daguerreotype, he thought, or one of those photographs he’d heard about, done with some new kind of glass plate. He supposed if they could do that, they could put the results in a book. Then the details of the picture began to register. The man had long, dark hair and a strong face marked with a thin but very visible scar that ran from his right temple down to his jaw. The woman had even longer, but lighter hair, a wealth of it, and eyes that he instinctively knew, despite the fact that he couldn’t know it from this picture, were blue. Vivid blue.

It made no sense, this certainty about the eyes of a woman who was a stranger to him. He stared at the picture, only now realizing that it was a drawing, a drawing so finely done and so incredibly detailed that it seemed impossible that it had been done by human hands.

He shook his head again. Had he seen this before? Was this some kind of drawing for a painting he’d once seen, perhaps with Gramps, who had always had a fondness Josh had never understood for paintings, statues, and the like. Was that why he was so sure this woman’s eyes were blue?

Impatiently he shifted his gaze to the man beside her, who appeared to be at least a foot taller than her, with shoulders to match his height, and a look in his eyes that didn’t bode well for whoever had given him that scar on his face. The fierce, predatory look of the man was softened slightly by the protective curving of his arm around the woman at his side, but that only heightened the overall effect—this was a man who would fight to the death to defend what was his.

And she was his, Josh thought as he studied the pair. No doubt about that. Both their postures declared it. He vaguely noticed the length and sheen of the woman’s hair—red, perhaps?—and the shape of the slender body beneath the layers of some kind of flowing gown, but again he couldn’t look away from her eyes. Wide and bright beneath arched brows, they were fringed with thick, soft lashes, and looked strangely familiar. It was like looking once again at something that had been seen so often it didn’t register anymore.

It hit him then. It was like looking into a mirror, or the unruffled surface of a pond. And seeing his own eyes look back at him.

He leapt to his feet, as if the book had burned him. He stared down at it once more, swallowing tightly. He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there when a sharp knock on his door startled him out of his seeming trance.

“Mr. Hawk?”

Luke’s voice, muffled as he stood out in the narrow hall, completed the job of yanking him back to normality. Josh walked over to the door.

“You alone, Luke?”

“ ’Course I am. Who’d be with me?”

Who indeed? Josh thought. Maybe whoever—or whatever—had sneaked this book into his room. And maybe, he thought wryly as he opened the door, you’d better ask if that beef Markum’s been cooking up had been chewing on locoweed.

“I finished your saddle, Mr. Hawk,” Luke said as he came in. “It looks good as new. Better, even.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said again as he closed the door behind the boy.

“But I wanted to,” Luke said earnestly. And shook his head fiercely when Josh offered him two bits. “I didn’t do it for money.”

Pride, Josh thought. A boy’s pride, the hardest to hang on to, and the easiest to hurt.

“I know you didn’t. But an honest man pays for work done.” Even, he thought ruefully, when he can’t really afford it; his stake was dwindling fast.

The boy hesitated, pride clearly battling with the desire for money he probably rarely had, even in these small amounts. “But you haven’t even seen it,” he said.

“You said you did a good job. I know you wouldn’t lie to me, Luke.”

“No, sir, I surely wouldn’t.”

“Then take what you’ve earned.”

Another second’s hesitation, then the boy grabbed the money and stuffed it into his pocket, as if afraid his benefactor would change his mind.

“And,” Josh added, “you can stop calling me Mr. Hawk. Josh will do.”

Luke stared at him. Slowly, a wide smile spread across the boy’s face, as if Josh had given him some kind of medal.

“Yes, sir, Mr.—Josh.”

Wide-eyed, he looked around the room, as if he expected it to be different somehow, because of who was in it. He spotted the book, and with the instant curiosity of the young, went over to look.

“Golly, I ain’t never seen a book like this before,” he exclaimed.

“I’m not sure I have, either,” Josh said dryly.

“Who are they?” Luke asked, pointing at the picture with a grubby finger that still bore signs of his work cleaning the saddle.

“I’m not sure,” Josh admitted.

Luke gave him a sideways look. “Can’t read, huh?” The boy shrugged. “Neither can Mr. Rankin. Neither could I, but Miss Kate, she’s been teachin’ me. She says she don’t read so good herself, and it helps her. So it’s like I’m doing her a favor, see?”

Pride, Josh thought again. “I see.”

“Bet she’d help you, too, if you asked her nice.”

Josh doubted that, but didn’t see any reason to disillusion the boy. “Actually, I can read.” He gestured at the book. “I just haven’t read that yet.”

“Oh.” Luke sat cross-legged on the bed and turned his attention back to the picture. “That’s some tough-lookin’ hombre.”

“I wouldn’t want to face him down,” Josh agreed.

“She’s pretty.” The boy’s blond brows came together. He glanced at Josh again, then back at the picture, then back at Josh. “She has your eyes,” he said.

Damn, Josh thought. Even this kid saw it. His jaw tightened, and he watched silently as Luke reached out and turned another page in the book. The boy’s brows lowered again as he stared at the next page.

“I ain’t never seen writin’ like this, either, all fancy and curvy like that.”

He was the picture of concentration as he stared at the writing. Josh could see from here that it was just what Luke had said, fancy and curvy. And it didn’t look like it had come off a printing press. It looked done by hand, although he couldn’t conceive of anyone having the patience to do an entire book like that.

“Je . . . Jen . . . a. Jenna? Is that a word?” Luke asked as he hunched over the book. But before Josh could speak, Luke yelped, “Hawk! It says Hawk, right here!”

Josh forgot to breathe for a moment as the boy’s exclamation confirmed his earlier crazy notion.

“Look, Mr. Ha—Josh!” Luke leapt to his feet, holding the book, turning it so Josh could see. “It’s a name, isn’t it? Jenna Hawk. She’s some kin of yours, isn’t she? That’s why her eyes are like yours.”

Josh wondered what the boy would say if he told him yes. If he told him that, if the legends were true, that the woman in that picture was indeed kin to him. An ancestor who had lived so long ago no one was really sure when. Or where.

And he wondered what Luke would say if he told him he was holding a piece of magic.

Damn, you sound like you’re believing this,
he thought as he stared at the boy, who was intently studying the book. He shook his head. This was crazy. It was one thing to hear about something all your life in fanciful stories you believed as a child, then realize couldn’t possibly be true, no matter how sincerely your grandfather seemed to believe in them. It was quite another to be standing looking at the proof those legends hadn’t been fanciful at all.

It couldn’t be. And yet the book was here. It had appeared, just as Gramps had said it would.

And it had nearly been too damned late, he thought absurdly. By all rights and reasons, he should be two days dead by now. The book was supposed to come to the last Hawk, Gramps had said, to help him find his way. He grimaced inwardly; if things had gone as scheduled, the only path that book would have been able to help him on was the path to hell, and he’d already gone halfway there himself. Maybe further.

You
really are loco,
he told himself. Believing in such things as wizardry and disappearing books. At least he assumed it disappeared just as it appeared, without a trace of evidence as to how.

The logical assumption was that someone had somehow gotten into his room and placed the book in his bag. But the evidence of his eyes was indisputable; no one had broken in. He would question the deskman, the whiskey drummer, and even the invalid owner of the hotel, but he knew with that gut-level instinct he’d learned not to question that they’d say they had nothing to do with it. And the final conclusion still remained; they would have no reason to have done it, or to lie about it.

Unless, he supposed, one of them had found the book, seen the Hawk name in it, assumed it was his, and returned it. He supposed not many would have the nerve to keep something they thought was The Hawk’s. This was a comforting thought—except for the still remaining problem about where the book had come from in the first place.

“This is a good story!” Luke exclaimed, jerking Josh out of his fruitless speculation. “Is there really a place like this?”

He walked over to the boy. “Like what?”

“Like this,” Luke said, pointing to the pages open before him. “With wizards and magic and all that.”

Josh looked, oddly relieved that the boy had turned past the page that had held the picture; looking at the woman with his eyes was a bit unnerving. He read the elegant script, lettering that seemed perfectly suited to the tale it told, of a long, long ago time and place, where written history didn’t exist or was lost in some kind of vague mist. And the tale of an amazing woman who was responsible for a large clan of people who were in danger. She couldn’t save them alone, so she found a champion, a warrior with no name . . . and in the end he took hers.

An image of the man beside the woman in the drawing flashed through his mind. A warrior. Yes, he could believe that. The man in that drawing was a warrior, of the bravest and most fearless kind. He would have had to have been, Josh thought with a stab of envy, if this Jenna Hawk was even half the woman the story said she was.

Hawks breed true.

He quashed the memory of his grandfather’s words, not wanting to dwell on the fact that he was the Hawk that disproved the rule.

“So is there?” Luke asked again.

“A place like this? I don’t know, Luke. Maybe it’s all just a story that somebody made up.”

“But it says that after they saved those people they got married, an’ had kids. That’s real, ain’t it? It says they were the found”—Luke hunched closer over the book, struggling with the long word—“the found . . . ation of the Hawk . . . din . . .”

Frustrated, the boy shoved the book at Josh, pointing at the last line of the writing on the page.

“There,” he said, “look at that.”

Josh looked. “Jenna and Kane,” he read aloud, “the foundation of the Hawk dynasty.”

“What’s a dynasty?”

“In this case,” Josh murmured as he stared at the scripted lines, “it means a family. A family that goes on for a very long time.”

“How long?”

“Centuries.”

“How long is that?”

Josh glanced at the boy then; Luke was looking at him expectantly. “A century is a hundred years. Hawks have been around for more of them than you’ve got fingers and toes.”

Luke’s eyes widened and the boy whistled in awe. He looked down at the book, then back at Josh. After a moment, he said very quietly, “It must be . . . good to know all that. About your family, I mean.”

Luke’s wistful tone made something tighten in Josh’s chest. It was ironic, he thought. Luke had been on his own for a third of his young life. Kate Dixon had had a husband who beat her nearly to death. While here he stood with a book chronicling the history of a proud family, a book telling him he had ancestors worth being proud of.

Yes, ironic was the word. The only one of the three of them who had a family to be proud of was the one who deserved it the least.

Assuming, of course, he believed this book was what it appeared to be. He shifted his attention back to it. He turned to the next page, the one after the end of Jenna and Kane’s story. His forehead creased as he looked at the page. It took a split second for him to realize what the intricate network of lines and names and dates, printed at odd angles, were. He turned the book sideways and the names came into focus, confirming his guess. It was a family tree. The Hawk family tree stretching unbroken through the centuries from Jenna and Kane and their children to . . .

A chill swept through him, like the chill that had shot through him when he’d first connected the appearance of the book in his saddlebags to the stories he’d heard all his life. He was surprised his hands were at all steady as he straightened the book, then turned it over in his hands to look at the pages in the back.

Blank. At least half the book was blank pages.

He began to riffle through the gilt-edged paper, going back toward the front of the book. He stopped the instant he saw more of the intricate network of lines and names, and opened the book all the way.

On the page before him, the lacework net of lines, once wide and varied, suddenly narrowed. An old, familiar pain shot through him as he looked at the last page, at all the names of his childhood, all of them registering dates of birth—and death. Early death. So few years between those dates, name after name after name. He thought bitterly that from 1861 on, the ink should be red, the color of blood, for the blood had surely been drained from the Hawk dynasty. Drained until what had been a mighty oak had dwindled to one small offshoot, one tiny branch that was all that was left.

One small, irrevocably twisted branch that bore the name Joshua Hawk.