Lynn Michaels

by The Dreaming Pool

  “Ra-món! Jesus, don’t!” Gage screamed, as Zeppo raised the rifle.

  Every muscle in his body tensed as he watched Marco’s cousin aim the rifle—and slip on the muddy trail. The barrel jerked to the left as he lost his footing, an earsplitting crack reverberated off the rock walls—but the stallion kept on running. Sheer, open-mouthed amazement flashed across Zeppo’s face, then he screamed as Ganymede’s thrusting right foreleg caught him in the groin. The rifle flew out of his hands, his body twisted grotesquely, then crumpled into the mud beneath the stallion’s hooves. No more than five yards behind Ganymede, Marco Byrne bounced the Jeep over his trampled cousin as the stallion swung hard left toward the rock-choked funnel that led into the canyon.

  Gage could see what Ramón intended to do, knew that with Marco Byrne so close behind he hadn’t any choice but to get Ganymede off the trail before the Jeep overtook him. That, Gage knew, would be fatal for both the stallion and the boy; the bloody memory of Ganylad dying in the rain flashed through his mind as he watched Ganymede gather himself to leap through the funnel. If he fell, the stallion could very easily break a leg, and Ramón could just as easily break his neck—or worse. How in hell the boy had ridden Ganymede this far with no bit and no reins to guide him was beyond Gage, and he heard himself shouting instructions that Ramón couldn’t hear as the stallion launched himself through the funnel and out of Gage’s sight.

  The Jeep didn’t even slow down, just rocketed off the trail behind Ganymede and shot toward the mouth of the canyon behind him. Gage saw the headlights bounce crazily, heard metal shriek as the Jeep jolted over the rocks. Sparks flew from the undercarriage, Marco Byrne jolted in his seat and the steering wheel spun uselessly in his hands as the Jeep tipped dangerously on its right side. The transmission roared and so did the engine as Marco trod on the accelerator and tried to regain control.

  Roll it, you son of a bitch, c’mon, roll it. Gage prayed, as he dug his heels into the shuddering, nearly finished chestnut beneath him. The Jeep didn’t roll, just lurched and spun and finally came to a precarious stop, its headlights raking across the funnel. With the silver automatic in his hand gleaming in the backwash of the lights, Marco climbed out of the Jeep and over the rocks into the canyon. With Eslin standing in her stirrups, the sorrel mare half ran and half jumped through the funnel behind him.

  “Eslin, no!” Gage shouted, hauling the chestnut up on his hind legs as the bay colt slid back on his haunches in the middle of the trail and Ethan jumped out of the saddle.

  Slipping and falling, his brother ran through the mud, went down on his knees next to the body of Marco’s cousin, and came up with his rifle in his hands. Gage swung his right leg over the pommel of his saddle, jumped to the ground, and ran on shuddery legs toward the canyon behind Ethan.

  Chapter 35

  Over the ring of the mare’s hooves on the rocks, Eslin heard Gage shout her name, but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t, not this close to the dreaming pool and the playing out of the final scene of her dream.

  The canyon looked just as it had when she’d dreamed it at Roundtree on Thursday night. The waterfall slid like a silver ribbon into the pool, the mossy ground glimmered with the faint, reflected glow of the nearly full moon riding just above the smooth dark walls. Everything was as it should be—or so Eslin thought until a shadowy figure darted out of the rocks in front of her.

  Whinnying with fright, the sorrel mare threw up her head, slipped on a patch of moss, and went down on her forelegs. The sudden lurch unseated Eslin and she somersaulted out of the saddle. Landing on her stomach, she lay winded but otherwise unhurt on the dank-smelling moss until a strong hand closed around her arm and jerked her up. She tried to twist away, then stumbled as the man who’d grabbed her hauled her roughly around to face him.

  It was the guide from Monte Alban, unbound and ungagged with blood caked on his forehead. Eslin gasped, and her body went rigid as he clicked open a switchblade knife and the point of it pricked her throat.

  “Hello again, Señorita Hillary,” he said in thickly accented English, as he half pushed, half dragged her along the edge of the pool, and the sorrel mare ran kicking ahead of them.

  The guide hadn’t been in her dream, his had not been one of the disembodied heads bobbing in the pool, which meant his presence here would—and already had—altered the changeable future. Frantically, Eslin tried to decide how, as he flung her ahead of him around the curve in the canyon wall.

  She fell again, this time on her hands and knees, raised her head, and saw what she’d seen in her dream: Ganymede and Ramón pinned near the back wall of the canyon by Marco Byrne and the silver pistol gleaming between his hands.

  The stallion swung his head toward the sorrel mare as she skittered up behind him, then snorted and looked back at Byrne. Except for the muscles quivering beneath his shaggy, mud-spattered coat and the slight rise and fall of his flanks, Ganymede didn’t move again, just stood with his head up and his ears pricked forward. He was, Eslin realized, a very big, very powerfully built animal. His height she guessed at seventeen hands, his weight at over half a ton, and she shivered remembering how easily he’d run down Marco’s cousin on the trail.

  As Byrne glanced at her over his shoulder, she remembered, too, that he hadn’t even tried to swerve to miss the fallen man with the Jeep. The stallion never took his eyes off Marco, but Ramón did as the guide hauled Eslin to her feet again and pushed her stumbling toward Byrne.

  “The back trail out of here was blocked with rocks when I got to it,” he said miserably, wiping some of the muck off his face with a muddy sleeve. “I guess he did it—I guess we didn’t hide him well enough.” Ramón nodded at the guide standing behind her. “His cousin must have found him and cut him loose.”

  “You guess correctly, compañero. Too late, but correctly.” Byrne glanced sideways at Eslin and smiled coldly. “You are very good, Miss Hillary, but unfortunately, not good enough.”

  Perspiration gleamed on Marco’s mud-streaked face, and his shiny, ebony-hard eyes glowed with triumph and madness in the pale light cast by the moon. Over the wild pounding of her heart Eslin heard echoing, running footsteps, whirled around, and saw the guide flatten himself against the canyon wall with his switchblade raised.

  “Gage, ru-u-u-n!” Eslin screamed, and tried to bolt away from Byrne.

  Like a vice his arm clamped around her throat. The bore of the pistol bit into her temple as she fell back against Marco’s chest and clawed her fingernails at his wrists. She heard Ganymede whinny shrilly, then saw Gage and Ethan running toward her.

  The gleam of the automatic pressed against Eslin’s head brought Gage to a skidding halt on the mossy rocks. As he flung his arm out to stop Ethan, the guide from Monte Alban stepped in front of them. There was dried blood on Harpo’s forehead and a switchblade in his hand. Groaning, Ethan handed him the rifle. He took it, pocketed the knife, and moved behind them.

  “Very wise of you,” Marco said, tightening his arm around Eslin’s throat as she struggled against him. “Please tell Miss Hillary that if she doesn’t stop digging her nails into my arm I will put a bullet in her head.”

  Gage didn’t have to; Byrne drew back the hammer on the pistol with an audible click. Eslin lowered her hands from Marco’s wrists and froze, her eyes wide with panic, her breast heaving beneath his arm.

  “You’re choking your witness,” Gage said as calmly as he could.

  Byrne released her, and Eslin crumpled to her knees, moaning and wrapping her hands around her throat. Gage started toward her, but Ethan laid a hand on his arm. He saw Ganymede then, near the back wall of the canyon, wheel toward Byrne on his hind legs as Ramón clenched a fistful of his mane in one hand and rubbed his neck with the other.

  Relieved as he was to see that the stallion hadn’t broken a leg or Ramón’s neck leaping through the funnel, Gage sensed his agitation in his laid-back ears and the pawing of one sharp, overgrown hoof. Ganymede didn’t so much as lift his head in Gage’s
direction, but the whites of his eyes showed as he snorted and shook his head at Byrne.

  “Tell them,” Marco ordered, raising his right arm and leveling the pistol at Ethan.

  “Our father,” he said unsteadily, “framed Johnny Byrne for doping our horses. He bribed the commissioners, paid them off to convict Johnny.”

  “You see how noble the Roundtrees are,” Marco said, nourishing the gun as he turned toward Ramón. “Do you still wish to ride their horses, compañero?”

  “Any day,” the boy answered, still rubbing the stallion’s neck as Ganymede’s hoof ripped clods of moss off the rocks.

  “My father was loyal to them too,” Marco told him, “and they murdered him.”

  “Your old man shot himself,” Ramón replied stonily.

  “Because of what the Roundtrees did to him!” Marco waved the gun again, his voice rising shrilly.

  Careful, Ramón, Gage thought, his heart thudding against his breastbone. Still on her knees, Eslin raised her head and looked at him. Her tangled dark hair and her face were flecked with mud. He took another step toward her, then froze as Harpo slid a cartridge into the chamber of the rifle, and the click of the bolt turned Marco around to face him and Ethan.

  “Now you both will die. But first”—he looked at Gage, then Eslin, and smiled as he grabbed her arm, hauled her to her feet, and jammed the automatic against her temple—”I think I will kill Miss Hillary.”

  Squeezing her eyes shut, Eslin tried not to cry. The dream had changed once, it could change again, she told herself, recoiling at the cold bite of the gun against her head. Oh, God, she wailed silently, oh, Gage, I love you.

  He heard her, as clearly as if she’d spoken out loud, and clenched his fists to keep his hands from shaking.

  “You’ll be one witness short if you do,” Gage said.

  “I think Miss Hillary is more to you than a witness,” Byrne said, his smile widening slowly. “She is, perhaps, your mistress?”

  Gage didn’t answer, he didn’t dare. The pistol was cocked, Marco’s finger on the trigger. If Eslin so much as breathed wrong it could discharge.

  Don’t move, he prayed, oh, God, oh, love, don’t move.

  Don’t worry, I won’t. Again, Gage heard her voice inside his head, then a half-second later saw her eyes fly open. Amazement flickered across her face, then vanished as she cringed and Marco, pressing the gun tighter to her head, swept his arm around her throat again.

  “You needn’t answer, I can see it in your eyes.” Byrne pivoted, dragging Eslin with him, so that he stood facing the pool with Ganymede and Ramón on his right, and Gage and Ethan on his left. He looked at them over his shoulder, his smile twisting malignantly. “Your brother must die, of course, but I see a better way to punish you, Gage Roundtree.”

  He straightened his left arm and pointed the pistol at Ganymede.

  Dim as the canyon was, there was light enough for Gage to see Ramón’s body stiffen and his hands start to shake as he stroked the stallion’s neck. Rumbling deep in his chest, Ganymede flared his nostrils and backed toward the pool.

  “I will be merciful, however. I will not kill the stallion and Miss Hillary.” Marco looked at Gage as he bent his arm again and pressed the gun to Eslin’s head. “I will only kill one of them—but you must choose, you must decide which one.”

  Ethan’s hand gripped Gage’s arm and Eslin’s eyes slid toward him, tears rolling down her cheeks. Ramón ducked his head and pressed both his hands to the stallion’s neck. His trembling fingers telegraphed his fear and turmoil to Ganymede, who lowered his head and rumbled again in his chest.

  A surge of impotent rage tightened the muscles across Gage’s chest. He had no choice, not with a gun jammed to Eslin’s head and the rifle in Harpo’s hands digging into his back. I’m sorry, Gany, he thought, a lump swelling in his throat as he looked at the stallion. I love you, old fella, but I love her more.

  “You son of a bitch,” Gage said, his voice unsteady and a throaty, pulsing thunder that he thought was nothing more than his own helpless rage ringing in his ears. “Let her go.”

  Marco grinned, but kept his arm around Eslin’s neck and the gun to her head.

  “You choose, then, to sacrifice the stallion?”

  “Yes!” Gage shouted.

  His voice reverberated off the canyon walls, the agony ringing in the echo tearing at Eslin’s heart. As it died away she heard a rhythmic, whirring noise that grew steadily louder until she felt the ground beneath her feet begin to vibrate. She felt gooseflesh spring on Marco’s skin, and his arm loosen on her throat as she watched the canyon walls begin to glow.

  Quickly, she shut her eyes to look at the dream, then felt the slow, crawling chill up her back that meant Gage had touched the neck chain. Eslin opened her eyes and turned her head over her shoulder in time to see his fingers close around the horseshoe nail.

  As he touched it, Ganymede screamed, reared, and sent Ramón sliding off his tail. The boy landed on his back, sprawled out on the rocks as the noise reached an echoing, deafening intensity that drowned out the stallion’s mad bugling. Another shiver raced up Eslin’s spine as a black-and-silver thing with lights streaming from its underside rose above the waterfall like some ancient god come back from the dead. No, it wasn’t a god, she realized, as she felt Marco’s arm fall away from her throat—it was a helicopter, and there was a second one lifting into the canyon behind it.

  Blinding, glaring light suddenly raked over Eslin, made her wince, and turned Ganymede’s bay coat blood-red. The rush of wind from the helicopters’ rotors caught and whipped the stallion’s mane and tail as he lunged toward Byrne, still halfway up on his hind legs, his teeth bared and the whites of his eyes showing. The sorrel mare ran in a bucking, terrified circle as Marco’s right arm and the gun snaked toward Ganymede, and Eslin hurled herself away from him. She landed on all fours beside the pool, staring at her muddy, wide-eyed reflection in the gleaming black water. Behind her she heard an earsplitting crack above the churning of the helicopters, rolled over, and saw the gun in Marco’s hand spit fire at Ganymede.

  He couldn’t have missed, he shouldn’t have missed, but he did. All four of the stallion’s feet touched ground and he charged, his ears flat against his head. His mouth falling open, Byrne stumbled backward a step or two, flung his head over his shoulder, and screamed at his cousin. The guide broke toward Marco, using the heavy wooden stock of the rifle as a wedge to force his way between Ethan and Gage.

  The blow caught Gage on the shoulder, knocked him forward, but he spun on his heel, reached out to grab Harpo, and saw that Ethan had already beaten him to it. His brother’s hands closed over the barrel, jerked it skyward, and a second earsplitting crack reverberated off the canyon walls as the recoil knocked Ethan and Harpo to the ground. Wheeling around, Gage rushed toward Byrne, and saw that it was already too late.

  So did Eslin, who watched, horrified but unable to look away. She heard Gage shout, saw him running toward Ganymede, and felt the wind tear at her hair as the helicopters swooped lower. Still screaming at his cousin, Marco tried, slipping and stumbling, to scramble out of the stallion’s path. He made one last, desperate effort to aim the gun at Ganymede, then froze, open mouthed with terror, as the stallion reared in front of him, his jagged, razor-sharp hooves gleaming in the spotlights that sliced through the darkness. The dream—irrevocably altered, forever changed—flashed through Eslin’s mind as Ganymede came down. Recoiling from the image, she threw herself down on the edge of the pool and hid her face in the crook of her elbow.

  Both the stallion’s front hooves caught Marco square in the chest and forced him to the ground. Still running, still shouting, Gage watched Ganymede rise again, then shuddered to a stop, sickened, as the stallion’s hooves came down again and broke Marco’s sternum with an audible snap.

  Eslin heard it, too, above the roar of the helicopters’ engines and the scrape of their skis as they touched down on the rocks. Lifting her head from the crook of her arm,
she pushed away the hair lashing across her eyes and watched Ganymede wheel away from Marco Byrne’s body, limping on his right foreleg, his withers rimed with lather.

  She heard shouts and running footsteps, but they sounded faint and very far away inside her head. Ethan staggered to his feet with the rifle, blood streaming from his nose, one eye swollen nearly shut. A man Eslin didn’t recognize ran up to him and caught him before he fell, another dodged past her and knelt beside Ramón as he stirred and tried to sit up. A gentle hand settled on her shoulder and she looked up at Doc, his silver hair ruffling in the wind. Sobbing, she threw her arms around him and buried her face in the front of the jacket he’d zipped over a heavy sweater.

  Gage had started toward Eslin, but stopped when he saw Fitzsimmons kneel beside her. He turned then toward Ganymede, and only the sorrel mare, who squealed and bolted, paid any attention to him as he approached the stallion. Snuffling through his nostrils, Ganymede lowered his head as Gage knelt beside him and gingerly ran his hand down his right foreleg. His palm came away bloody from the bullet wound that had sliced across the stallion’s withers. Only the hide was split, and though Gage could see the muscle beneath, it wasn’t torn or bleeding. He let out his breath then, rose, and slid his arms around Ganymede’s neck. The stallion snuffled again, and some of the tremor eased out of his muscles as Gage sagged against him and cried.

  For the second time in ten days he cried until he couldn’t cry anymore. He cried because Marco Byrne was dead and shouldn’t be, because he’d nearly lost Eslin and Ethan, could have lost Ramón, and because he’d lost a part of himself. He’d gained something else in its place, though he wasn’t quite sure what. Not yet.

  When a shaky hand settled on his shoulder, Gage wiped one sleeve across his face and turned around. Ethan stood behind him, his face bruised and swollen, an olive wool blanket draped around his shoulders. They looked at each other for a long minute, then Gage threw his arms around his brother and tried not to cry again. He didn’t make it, but neither did Ethan.