“I didn’t know then, just knew that she didn’t smell human. She was gorgeous. In a room full of richer-looking, certainly better-looking men”—Joseph nudged him with an elbow—“she picks two dirty, tired cowboys? Felt like a trap. I figured out who she was after the bodies turned up. There were no wounds. Just two dead men sitting in a car in the middle of a pleasant spring day, frozen all the way through. The coroner figured someone had murdered them in an ice locker or commercial freezer, then staged the bodies.”
“The Cold Woman … why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“By the time I figured it out, you’d met Maggie. The Cold Woman wasn’t as important as other things.”
“I think I’m glad I didn’t know,” Joseph said.
“Too much knowledge can make you paranoid all the time,” Charles agreed. “It can also make you a target.” They came to the junction where the Sani road met the highway. He turned the UTV around and headed back to the ranch house.
“So if my father is right about everything—is Chelsea evil?”
“Hosteen is not right about everything.” Charles grinned at Joseph’s ironic tones. “And Chelsea is no more evil than you or I.” He paused thoughtfully. “Than I am, anyway. I don’t know about you.” More seriously he said, “There is a scent to black magic—I would smell it.”
“Ah, good,” Joseph said. Then he said, in the same tone, “My wife will ask you to Change her after I’m dead.”
Charles had no time to prepare. No warning to brace himself, and he felt as though he’d been punched: Maggie.
He had loved her once. She was a fiery warrior, Maggie. Tough and smart and funny—and unexpectedly tender. If he closed his eyes he could still see her, her beautiful bright eyes wet and luminous. There were many things in his years on earth that were faded by time, but not that night. That night was clear as cut glass.
“If you would have me, I would be yours,” Maggie said, moonlight softening her fierce young features into something more accessible.
He knew how hard those words were from this proud woman who did not believe in making herself vulnerable for anyone. Her childhood had been hard and hadn’t made it easy for her to trust.
The night air was crisp—spring in the desert. The wooden boards of her porch were uneven under his feet. He could hear the wild-caught horses in the corrals moving idly a dozen yards from the little house. Could hear the soft sounds of Joseph’s sleeping breath.
Her roughened hands reached out slowly, and he did not back away. They touched his face and he closed his eyes, allowing himself the comfort of her touch. To be touched with love was uncommon in his life, and he treasured it, absorbed it.
She was beautiful, but that had nothing to do with why he loved her. He loved her for her refusal to give in to a world that twice judged her wrongly, first for the color of her skin and then for her sex. He loved her for the joy she took in the sun on her back and the horses she rode. He loved her for the laughter she found in danger and storms.
And that was why he’d let it go this far. Far enough that she risked her battered heart—and he’d done it knowing that he would break it. There was no name for the depth of hell he deserved for doing that to a woman he loved.
He pulled back gently. “You don’t know me, Maggie. If you knew what I am you would not touch me.” But he knew her. And that knowledge gave him no hope to cling to—no excuse for letting her think that they might be more than what they were.
“I know you,” she said, trying to hide her hurt. She couldn’t hide from him, but he didn’t let her know that. Her pride he would protect as well as he could; it was easier than protecting her poor heart. His poor heart.
“We may have known each other for only four months,” she continued. “But those have been four months of sixteen-, sometimes eighteen-hour days. I know you, Charles Smith.”
You don’t even know my name, he thought in despair. And I don’t dare give it to you. He wanted to take what she offered, wanted to drown himself in her until he wasn’t alone anymore.
“I am not who you think I am,” he told her. I am a liar. I have lied because I could not bear for you to turn away from me.
“If you tell me you’re a murderer,” she said stoutly, “I’d say that whoever you killed deserved it. If you tell me you are a thief, I’d not believe it. Thieves don’t work as hard as you do, and I should know. My dad was a thief and a murderer—he killed my mother as surely as if he’d shot her. I know evil, Charles. And I know a good man when I see him.”
His father’s rules rang in his ears. No one must know what you are. Charles had lived long enough, seen enough, to know that his father was right—and still. She thought that he was a good man when he wasn’t a man at all.
“You know a good man, do you?” he asked, feeling anger sweep up and make him light-headed. “Do you?” asked Brother Wolf, hurt and enraged that he would be the cause of such tragedy. Brother Wolf loved her, too, but he knew that she could not love him. Would not love him. “Then see me, Margaret. See me and tell me again that you love me.”
In despair and anger then—knowing what would happen because even though she did not know him, he did know her—he did what he’d sworn he would not do. He let Brother Wolf’s shape take him, glorying in the odd quirk of magic that let him shift swiftly, faster now because it had been so long since he’d allowed Brother Wolf to stand out in the real world.
Maggie froze. For a moment there was no expression on her face at all, and then it went blank with fear. She screamed and stumbled away from him, falling to the ground and curling into a ball. Not physical fear, but fear of what he was, what he might turn her into. The Navajo had more experience than most with the ugly side of magic.
Joseph barreled out the front door and saw Maggie and Charles. He’d always been quick; he took in everything at a glance. Joseph, the son of a werewolf, knew what Charles was, had known what Charles was from the first.
But Joseph was also the son of his mother, who had been so frightened when she found out what it was she had married that she’d left them and gone back to the reservation. Joseph understood the terror that had stricken Maggie silent, too.
Joseph knelt and gathered Maggie into his arms and made soothing noises. She quieted, her head buried against his shoulder so she couldn’t see the wolf. Joseph looked up at Charles.