Chelsea slept, curled up in the corner of the bed. They’d left the lights on because nothing short of a nuclear explosion was going to wake her up.
Maggie was seated in a rocking chair, reading a book that she’d set down as soon as Kage appeared. Hosteen had a book, too, but his brooding unhappiness was strong enough that Anna’s wolf took a decided interest.
Maggie watched her son and then stood up. “Anna?” she said. “Could I have a word with you?”
“Do you think I did the wrong thing? Changing Chelsea instead of letting her die?” Charles asked, again. They were coming up to the house, but Charles drove past the turnoff for the driveway.
“Do I? Yes.” That was his friend. Blunt to the point of rudeness, but only with Charles. “Does she?” Joseph made an ambiguous sound that might have been a sigh if he’d had more air. “I think that in the heat of the moment, she would have fought for her life. Any kind of life. I think if you asked her right now, she’d say she was grateful. What she will say in five years or ten?” He shrugged.
“Did you know she was a witch?” Charles asked.
Joseph nodded. “She told me before she married my son. She wanted Maggie and me to understand what we were getting ourselves into. Black witches hunt down people like Chelsea; untrained witches apparently can feed them a lot of power. She’s pretty sure that her first husband was killed by a witch hunting her. She changed her name, bundled Max up, and moved from Michigan to Arizona. I told her that we already had werewolves; a witch would be a welcome change.”
“And Maggie?”
Joseph said, “It was the worst argument we ever had—and I don’t think either of us said a word about it.” He shrugged. “My father likes to argue, to use words. I think his way is better—but it is not Maggie’s way. So we were silent for a while and things went back to normal. Maggie likes her now.”
“But not Hosteen.”
Joseph frowned fiercely. “He keeps the old ways so alive he forgets what is true and what is false. He believes witches are evil because the Navajo stories of witches are all about evil witches. He still believes in the monsters in the stories his mother told him and her mother told her.”
“Navajo witchcraft is such that Navajo witches are evil. If they are not evil, then they are not witches,” Charles said. “And your father is right about the monsters. I’ve met a few of them. The worst monsters hide in plain sight.”
Joseph frowned at him. “Monsters here?”
“I’ve seen skinwalkers who wear the skins of dead men so they look like the person they have killed. I have seen the Cold Woman,” Charles said. He’d forgotten how easy it was to talk to Joseph. “So have you. Do you remember that woman in that old bar in Willcox? The persistent one who tried to get us both to come home with her?”
“Yes,” Joseph admitted. “You were pretty adamant that we had to wait for a friend we didn’t have.”
“Two men went missing that night and were found dead in their car a few weeks later a couple hundred miles away,” Charles said.
“She was the Cold Woman,” he said. “How did you know?”
“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.
“Give her some time,” he counseled. “Let her see that the wolf is still you.”
If he’d listened, maybe his life would have been different, and so would Joseph’s. But he hadn’t listened; he’d left at a run, knowing that she’d be safe with Joseph. When he came back a year later, he had not been surprised to learn that Joseph and Maggie were married.
“Did you ever think about what might have happened if you hadn’t left that night?” said Joseph.
It didn’t surprise him that Joseph understood what Charles had been thinking about. Dying left a man very close to the whole spirit of the world, and odd things made it through. As long as he didn’t draw Joseph’s attention to it, Joseph wouldn’t even notice.
“Yes,” Charles said.
Joseph laughed. “You ever lie?”
“Not unless lives are on the line,” he told his old friend.
“Yeah, I remember a few of those times,” he agreed. “Now that you mention them.” There was a natural pause. “The stories I’ve heard about you and Anna—they tell me that you’ve learned to fight for what you want.”
Charles let that ride for a moment, trying to frame the truth. “I think I’ve learned what I wanted. Maggie could never have loved Brother Wolf the way we needed her to. In a stupid way, I think that’s why I wanted her so badly.”
“Man, that’s twisted,” said Joseph. “You loved her because she only loved your human half.” He thought a moment. “Is that, like, sibling rivalry? Does that mean you have a ménage à trois now, you old rogue, you?”
Charles found himself smiling. “Maybe à quatre, don’t you think? Anna has a wolf side, too.”
Joseph fell asleep as Charles drove up to the house. He slept while Charles carried him up to the door. Maggie opened it before he needed to worry about how to get through it without waking Joseph up. She followed him silently up to Joseph’s apartment and watched as he tucked Joseph in. The host of medical equipment had been pulled to the side of the room and stood like a grim, silent reminder that this chance to talk with his old friend was a finite thing.
“You don’t sleep in here?” he asked. Because this room was all Joseph.
“He sent me away,” Maggie told him. “Right after the cancer came back. Told me I needed my sleep.” She leaned against the wall and looked at Joseph. “He probably meant it. But the pain makes sleep very hard for him to find; mostly he dozes because he can’t really sleep. I move in my sleep, I always have. He can’t sleep with me in his bed.” She pushed off the wall and walked to the bed.
“You could sleep with him tonight,” he told her. “He’s exhausted, and the pain shouldn’t be too bad.”
“An effect of your magic?” she asked. “It’s good that something could stop the pain.” She looked at Charles. “I know it’s not permanent, but it is hard not to hate you for leaving him alone when you could have helped. He’s been in so much pain.”
He opened his mouth to tell her that it wasn’t his magic. That he had no idea why the spirits had decided to relieve Joseph of his burden for a while. That they probably wouldn’t have helped earlier. But he closed his mouth without speaking. She didn’t need truth. She needed someone to be angry at because anger was easier than pain. He could give her that.
She sat down on the bed and turned her attention to Joseph, who slept like a child.
“Silly old man,” she said, brushing his hair with her hand. “Think a little magic is going to turn back the years? So you can go out and break mustangs and women’s hearts again?”
It can, Charles thought. Because he’d lied to Kage. He could pull Joseph through the Change whether or not his old friend wanted him to. Chelsea had taught him how to do it.
In his heart, he ached more for this man than he ever had for Maggie, and his heart had ached plenty for her.
“What am I going to do with you?” Maggie asked her husband.
Joseph didn’t answer her, and neither did Charles.
“Go away,” she told him finally, her hand on Joseph’s cheek. Just as she had touched him once.
A long time ago.
He left, closing the door carefully, and pretended he didn’t know she was crying.