The Ruination of Essie Sparks (Wild Western Rogues Series, Book 2) (10 page)

Anyone would.

Pulling her gaze deliberately from the unconscious man, she kicked the horse into a trot and headed back down the way they'd come.

Chapter 6

The buzzing high that had ridden for most of the day with Little Wolf shrank as the daylight faded. He had never been afraid of the dark until his nights alone in the Wages of Sin. But then he'd been confined and weak. Now, things were different. He was free. For the first time in two years, free and himself again. As much of himself, that is, as he could remember.

As he rode past trees and rivers and rocks, he unburied their names from his mind.
Hoohtsėstse
—the cottonwood tree—growing by the...
tóxeo'hé'e
—riverbank—and the...
sé...sée... s
éenēva—
boulder. It had been so long since he'd spoken those words aloud, he found himself doing just that as he and Lalo trotted through the darkening forest.

Still, with the sun sinking behind the mountains and the late summer moon rising in the east the prospect of his first night alone under the stars settled upon him uneasily. Perhaps he should keep moving through the night. He didn't feel tired yet, though he guessed Lalo did.

The paint pony beneath him had bravely carried him all day without complaint. But the horse needed rest and food. As he approached a wide field of summer grass, he pulled Lalo to a stop and dismounted.

He turned to look behind him. No one was following him. Perhaps they had decided to let him go. Perhaps they didn't care about Lalo or him enough to chase them down in the mountains. No one had noticed when the boy named Huckleberry ran away. No one even cared. And he was at least as unwanted as that white boy had been.

Perhaps the guards were still looking for their horses on a mountaintop far away. It gave him a secret pleasure to think of them scrambling up some mountain on foot to find those horses, cursing at the weeds and rocks in their way.

Then again, maybe he just could not see them following him. Maybe, even now, they were in the trees behind him, waiting until dark to take him. He looked back fearfully, but saw no one.

Hours ago, he and Lalo had crossed a river with a high waterfall at the crest of the last mountain. He had a full canteen—stolen from the stable guard, along with his skinning knife. But almost all of the food he'd pilfered for the trip had gotten wet in the fording of a river that had been deeper than it looked. A foolish mistake he was already paying for with a growling stomach. He took a still-dry cracker from his pocket and nibbled on it. Hunting with only a knife would not be easy. Berries might have to do.

Soon, he told himself, he would see his parents again. He feared they had forgotten him by now, for he had not seen them since the Big Hoop Moon, two cold winters ago.

He tried to imagine his mother's eyes when she saw how tall he'd grown. Would his father, a Dog Soldier, be proud of his escape? Would he give him a bow of his own? Would there be any more Sun Dances for boys like him?

He thought of his friends back at the school: John and Mark and Joshua, whose Cheyenne names he was never allowed to say and had forgotten. He already missed them, and wondered if he would ever see them again. Or if they would die before they could return to the lodges of the People.

Beside him, Lalo snorted, ears perked forward at something in the woods. Little Wolf stared past the lodgepole pines, deeper into the shadows where the silhouette of a young fox sat, dog-like, staring at him. Even in the deep shade of the forest, his red coat shone.

Reflexively, Little Wolf's hand went to the knife at his hip and he scanned the woods for the fox's brothers. But the fox seemed to be alone and made no move in his direction. It simply watched him curiously and yawned.

Little Wolf smiled and lifted a hand to the fox in acknowledgement. The fox's over-large ears twitched in reply, then he turned and disappeared into the forest.

From the gloaming dark, somewhere on a distant peak, came the sound of wolves howling. An answering pack yowled in the distance. He shivered. That was why the fox had vanished.

He mounted and nudged Lalo forward, his thoughts drifting back to a memory of his father settling a wolf cub in his arms when he'd been just a boy. One of the Dog Soldiers had found the cub alone in the woods and brought it back to camp. That cub had been raised up in the tribe, as tame as a dog, and Little Wolf had named him
Ésáa-hetseváhe
—He Is Not Afraid.

Ésáa-hetseváhe
followed Little Wolf wherever he went. Others called them Big Wolf and Little Wolf, so inseparable were they. There was nowhere he went that the wolf would not follow. They'd had many adventures until the day the agency had taken all the children away and sent them to the Industrial School. It had been raining that day, so hard the mud puddles soaked their ankles and sucked at the axles of their wagons. Even then, the wolf had tried to chase after him, but his mother had tied the wolf to a stake so the white men wouldn't kill him. The rain hid the tears of all of the children that day and those of their parents. But it could not drown out the howls of
Ésáa-hetseváhe
as he strained frantically at the rope Little Wolf's mother had tied to him. He had howled and howled. If Little Wolf closed his eyes, he could still hear the confusion in his cry.

He wondered about that wolf now. Was he still alive? Had he gone off to find his own kind? Was he, even now, howling in the distance, calling for him?

Little Wolf tipped his head back to the rising moon. "
Aaaahhh-rooooo
!" he howled into the still mountain air. "
Aaa-ahh-ahhrooo-rooo
!"

I am here, Ésáa-hetseváhe! I am Little Wolf and I am coming for you!

From somewhere far off, a lone wolf answered.

* * *

As Essie made her way downhill on Náhkohe, the lightness that had buoyed her at her escape leaked away fast, replaced by guilt.

Guilt she couldn't reconcile.

You took his horse and his knife
.

I couldn't be expected to make it back barefoot, could I?

Why should she care? It served him right, taking her the way he had. And for what? To torment her for a day with his bullying and his accusing gray eyes?

He saved your life. Twice.

What if he did? He only did it so he could use me to his own ends.

She frowned. Was that right? How could she know? He'd barely communicated with her.

Still, scenes from the day flashed through her memory: him lying unconscious by the river; reaching his hand to her to save her; shoving her out of the way of bullets at the barn. His fingers, unlacing the strings of her corset.

She shook her head.
Do not make him something he is not. He wouldn't even tell you his name!

"Learn to live with disappointment, Essie Sparks. Like the rest of us do."
He knew nothing about the disappointment she'd lived with. How could he? He thought her life was perfect.

But then... he knew as little about her life as she did about his. He was just a man. And she was just a woman. From two different worlds, true, but still...

She nudged Náhkohe and urged him into a reluctant trot. She had, after all, seen him, completely. Standing stripped bare in the creek as she bound his wound. She should have been appalled, and she
was
, but that wasn't all.

Her glimpse of him had fascinated her and terrified her, but worse was the undeniable rush of something foreign. A tightening. An indecent
wanting
. A shameful urge to—

To what? Touch him? Admire what lay nestled between his strong thighs? To wonder what it would be like to lie with a man like him? All sleek and muscled and—

Stop it!

It wasn't as if she'd never seen a man naked before. She'd glimpsed her late husband, once or twice when he'd forgotten to turn down the light. And certainly, she'd felt him touching her... down there. But she'd never been allowed to touch him back. Or look at him.

And he'd never stood before her, unashamed, like that moment in the river when her captor had.

All day, she'd been silently comparing the man himself to others she'd known: her husband, whose face she already struggled to remember. Or Thomas Peakin, the scrawny Pennsylvanian teacher who fancied himself her match back at the Industrial School and who had spent the last three days plotting ways to keep her there—as if she would ever stay for him. The married Reverend Dooley, who, at thirty-seven, was only nine years older than her but seemed more like twenty with his flaccid paunch and his sleep-starved eyes that made her feel vague guilt whenever her gaze met his. Even the awful Mitchell Laddner, the man probably chasing them now.

No, those men were nothing like the man she'd left lying by the river.

Nothing like those gray eyes that seemed to see inside her silences. Or remind her of how long it had been since she had a man beside her she could count on.

He could have left you tied to a tree while he slipped into unconsciousness. Maybe while he died. And then what would have become of you?

But he hadn't.

She passed a stand of ponderosa pines with their dark green summer needles glinting in the twilight and the horse dropped its head to tug at the rich grass slope, refusing to move.

Something rustled in the brush in the stand of brambles to her left and Náhkohe shied hard to the right. She nearly fell off, but clung on somehow. Her heart tumbled around inside her until a squirrel scurried out from under the brush and up a tree. The Appaloosa snorted and danced until he was pointed back up the mountain, then laid its ears back and arched its neck to look back at her, taking a few steps in the direction of the man they'd left behind.

She narrowed a look at him and reined him back. "Whoa!"

The horse tossed its head, obstinately.

"What?" she said. "We are going down, not up."

But the horse had other ideas and fought her, turning in circles as she tried to steer him the way she wanted.

Stubborn
.

The horse wasn't having any of it. She supposed she'd be laughed at for thinking the horse had more compassion than she did. But possibly, that was true.

Ugh.
What woman in her right mind would go back to a man who'd kidnapped her? What woman with any sort of conscience would leave him there?

She exhaled a sound of frustration and sighed. Finally, she gave the horse its head and without further encouragement, the animal, aptly named for a wild beast, took off at a run back up the hill.

* * *

He woke to an explosion of pain in his leg and someone—
that woman
—leaning over him. Firelight glinted off something—
the steel blade
—in her hands.

Before she could do more than gasp, he threw her onto her back, wrenched the knife from her and laid an arm against her throat.

"Trying to kill me?" he hissed, feeling the forest around him swim sideways.

Eyes wide, she shook her head, but did little more than croak at him. "I'm not—!"

"Knew I couldn't trust you,
vé'ho'á'e
—"

The woman choked, trying to catch her breath. But it occurred to him that he'd thrown his weight onto her and she could not get air. Even in the flickering firelight, he could see the blue cast to her lips as she struggled to breathe. He punished her for another few seconds before rolling off her and onto his back beside her.

He heard her suck air into her deprived lungs.

She coughed and choked, then rolled onto her knees away from him. "What is wrong with you!" she sputtered when she could finally talk. "That's what I"—she coughed again—"what I get for trying to help you!"

"
Help
me?" He proffered the knife as evidence. "With this?"

"Yes, for God's sake." She unfurled her other fist and thrust her open palm in his direction.

The pain in his leg flared again. For a moment, he couldn't quite grasp what he was seeing. Her hands were covered in blood. His blood. In the center of her palm, the thumbnail-sized chunk of lead that had come, apparently, from his leg. He looked down at the long slit she'd cut into the leather of his leggings. The wound was still bleeding.

He shook his head, feeling like a fool. "I thought—"