Rage, vengeance, a need for justice. They belonged to him now. Jack exhaled, felt his heartbeat slow, his body grow in strength, felt a terrible peace befall him.
This time, as he thought about what he wanted to say, a grim self-assuredness that he hadn’t possessed even a moment ago now gripped him, telling him he had nothing to fear from the words he had to say. The words meant nothing. Because the acts they spoke of had already been done. And that was what he needed to deal with. Retribution for those acts. So, all he had to do was … tell her. And then, he’d leave, go set things to rights. By himself.
With all that decided, Jack focused on Angel and said, “I spoke with Standing Elk … outside. It was Seth, Angel. My brother. He did it. All of it.”
* * *
“Seth?” Angel repeated, not understanding … at least, not consciously. Perhaps some part of her knew, because her heart began thudding, her palms became damp, and her knees weakened. Still, she had to clear her throat before she could get out her next words. “Did what, Jack? What all did Seth do?”
His face a study in stark contrasts, in hardness overlaying an aching hurt, in a man’s sharp planes and angles atop a child’s rounded face, Jack looked away from her, directing his gaze to his boots, his hands to his waist. His dark head seemed to hang between his shoulders. Then he looked up, looking lost, and sought her gaze. “Everything. All of it. Shot up Lou and Boots. Killed Tex and Calvin. The horses, the cattle … the dogs.”
Shock gripped Angel. She gasped, stiffening her knees, and protested … because her mind refused to accept what he said. “But he couldn’t have,” she cried as she took a step toward him. “Boots said there were a bunch of men. Seth’s only one—”
“Seth has a gang he rides with, Angel. They helped him. And I can’t account for them right now. Since he came here alone, I fear he may have sent them riding out after the herd by now. You need to know that if they catch up to them, if they kill the men and take the cattle into Abilene and sell them … then there is no Circle D. Because all the money’s gone, too. There’d be no starting over. This place would dry up and blow away.”
“No.” She couldn’t even entertain such a thought. This was her home. “Why is he doing this, Jack? Why? What does he want?” she said angrily.
“The same thing you do. The same thing I do. The Circle D. He wants it. The land, Angel. It’s about the land.”
“The land? All this killing’s about the land? It’s not covered in gold. What you’re saying just doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does to Seth.”
Shaking her head, confused, angry, Angel stared at him. Could simply wanting the land mean its death? Did coveting its rich grassy acres cost people their lives, kill its innocent creatures, and stain its ground with blood? No, she couldn’t believe that. She wanted to build on it, wanted to make something good for herself on it. She wasn’t like Seth. She wasn’t. “But he’s destroying it,” she cried when Jack just stood there, a grim expression on his face. “What good would the ranch be to him then?”
Jack still didn’t say anything. Angel wanted to shake him. Had he turned to stone? Was he waiting for her to figure it out on her own? But then, it came to her. She knew. And gasped with the truth that lay within her own words. A seeping coldness overtook her limbs and worked its way toward her heart. “My God, that’s exactly what he wants, isn’t it? He wants to destroy everything you’ve built here.”
Finally, Jack nodded and spoke. “Yes.”
“Why?” Angel’s question, the one word, was no more than an angry cry.
“Because he hates us. Me. My father. He always has.”
Something about the way he said “my father” caught Angel’s attention. “Oh, God, no … Jack, don’t tell me.…” Unable to look away from the awful truth darkening his blue eyes, Angel’s knotted hands found their way to her chest and pressed against her lurching heart.
“He did it, Angel. He killed my father. His father.”
Angel swallowed, felt as if her throat were closing up on her. But still she managed to get her words out. “What are you going to do?”
“Kill him,” he said without hesitation. For all the emotion he exuded as he stood there, he could have been made of stone. Indeed, his voice was hard and flinty, his stance rigid. But then, and abruptly, with jerky movements, he turned and went to his bed. Sitting on its side and leaning forward, he braced his elbows atop his knees and cupped his face in his hands. No sounds came from him. His shoulders didn’t shake. He just sat there … frozen.
An eye for an eye. Angel blinked, put a hand out to him, pulled it back. If she touched him, he’d shatter. She knew that. And she also knew better than to argue with him right now. Knew better than to tell him he couldn’t go kill his own brother. That he’d be no better than Seth, if he did. Because this was a family matter. His family. He’d take care of it as he saw fit. She had no business interfering. Not that he’d listen to her, anyway.
But still, she wanted to ask him what had gone on in this house that had brought them all to this. What had made Seth into the monster he was? What was it that had caused the bad blood between Jack and his father? And the bad blood that had been evident yesterday between Jack and Seth, even before Jack knew anything about Seth’s murdering ways?
And what in the living hell was it that made Wallace Daltry leave everything to me, and not to his sons, Angel railed. Why involve me? What’s behind all this? she asked herself for the hundredth time.
It was just sick, was what it was. No, she didn’t hold any particular love in her heart for her mother. But she sure as heck hadn’t ever thought about killing the woman. What ate the worst at Angel now, though, was the notion that the old man had been killed for his kindness to her. It was so hard to accept, that what to her had been a mercy, a blessing—being given the Circle D—was to his sons a betrayal.
She saw that now. And could only stare at Jack’s bent head and shake her own. And pray he was somehow innocent in all this. Because she was beginning to fear she could come to feel something for him. Something more than was good for either of them, given the battles yet to come. Just thinking of battles made Angel want to slump on the bed next to Jack. She’d thought her troubles were over the day she rode out of Red River Station. She’d thought her near rape and then the near lynching she’d been through were the worst things she’d ever be asked to endure.
Now she knew better. Because Seth Daltry was beginning to look like her worst nightmare yet to come. He’d killed two hired hands and had tried to kill those old men down the hall. Then he’d succeeded in killing his own father. A shudder ripped through Angel, when she thought of how close he’d been to her that night on the trail. Quickly she turned her thoughts away from that scene, away from that terror, and back to a litany of Seth’s sins. He’d next tried to kill his own brother. But she’d stopped him. And then he’d threatened her.
Dear God. Now she knew he’d make good on that threat, if he got the chance. Angel drew herself up, telling herself she’d just have to see to it that he didn’t get that chance, now wouldn’t she?
Belying her bravado was a sudden sickness that invaded her soul. Her insides turned to cold stone, locking her muscles, stiffening her knees. She stared wordlessly at Jack. And thought again of Wallace Daltry. Again she saw the knife protruding from his chest, saw again his life’s blood staining his bedroll. For a second, she closed her eyes, forcing her air and the sickness out, and inhaling a dreadful, numbing calm.
Then she looked again at Jack, watched him a moment. Felt for what he must be going through. “You all right?” she heard herself ask. But the voice sounded tinny, not at all like her own, even to her ears.
He looked up at her, dragging his face out of the shelter of his hands. His eyes were dry, bloodshot. He nodded, looking anything but all right.
Angel knew it was a stupid thing to ask—how could he be all right?—but she had no words of comfort to say to him. Except his earlier words to her about
her mother. “I’m real sorry, Jack.”
Again he nodded, now dropping his hands between his knees. “Me, too. But not half as sorry as Seth’s going to be.”
Angel swallowed. She hated that he was going through this. Hated it. Not knowing what else to do, how to help him, but seeing that talking to him kept him from walking out the door and strapping on a gun, seeing that her words were keeping him from putting himself in harm’s way, Angel asked, “You sure it was Seth? You sure that Comanche brave—”
“Standing Elk wouldn’t lie.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” Angel rushed on. “I was going to ask how he knew … since he wasn’t there. With your father, I mean.” Instantly the opposite possibility crossed Angel’s mind, and she gave voice to it. “Unless he was there, Jack. Think about it.”
A flicker of emotion crossed his features. He blinked, a muscle in his jaw twitched, he shook his head. “I don’t need to think about it. Standing Elk wasn’t there. But he knows because Pa’s murder, and everything else, was … seen.”
It was seen. He didn’t have to say how or by whom. Angel already knew. “The white wolf. The medicine man’s vision.” Skepticism had her pressing her lips together into a straight, firm line. When Jack nodded that she was right, Angel’s heart sank. “Jack, you can’t go kill your brother on the strength of what some Comanche medicine man says he saw in a vision.”
With a heavy sigh of exhaled breath, Jack levered himself up, his hands pressing against his knees as he did so. Then he stood there, staring at her. “Yes I can. You don’t understand their ways, Angel. I do. I was raised by one of them. And I know their visions to be true. You, yourself, have seen the wolf.”
Further arguments—all of them logical—screamed to be voiced, but Angel held her tongue. Now was not the time. Jack was hurting too much. He wasn’t thinking straight. But then a sudden vision of her own—of herself pulling the bone-handled knife from Wallace Daltry’s bloodied chest—told her that now was the time to speak of that.
“Then there’s something I want to show you,” she said without preamble, already walking toward him. “Come with me.”
“All right,” he agreed readily enough, not touching her as she passed him, and falling in behind her, then reaching around her to open the door and hold it for her. In that way, him behind her, she walked him to her room.
Once they crossed the threshhold, Jack said, quite out of the blue, “This was Old Mother’s room when she lived here. I’m surprised you don’t feel her in here sometimes.”
Angel’s steps faltered, she gasped as her widening eyes sought Jack’s when he stepped around her and looked the room over, touching things, turning them over. He acted as if he hadn’t even noticed her reaction. So Angel glanced around with him, now seeing the square and inviting area through new eyes. Maybe that explained why she’d been so drawn to this room when she’d come upstairs on her first day here. She recalled again how scared she’d been, what with all the quiet and the abandoned look of the place. But this room had looked warm and sunny. And she’d chosen it—Stop it, she chastised herself. Just stop it.
I chose this room by pure chance and that’s all there is to it, she insisted to herself, refusing to accept any other explanation. Angry at herself for giving in to silly daydreams, she stalked across the room to her narrow, Indian-blanket-covered bed, and without thinking too much about it, bent down and lifted the mattress—Jack said not a word, made not a sound—and reached under it to pull out her oilskin-wrapped belongings.
Allowing the mattress to flop back into place, she laid the pouch on her bed and opened it, exposing her treasures—for the first time in her life—to another person. She mentally defended her actions by asking her protesting half what choice she had in the matter, under the circumstances? “Here’s what I wanted to show you,” she quickly said over her shoulder as she moved aside her tattered rag-cloth doll to reveal the knife.
A sudden hissing intake of breath from beside her preceded Jack reaching in to grab up the long-bladed weapon. He eyed it, turning it over in his hands, and then sought her gaze. Anger blazed in the blue depths of his eyes. “What are you doing with this? Where’d you get this knife?”
Angel swallowed, suddenly hesitant to say where. “Then you know who this knife belongs to?”
“Hell, yes. It’s mine. Where’d you—”
“It’s yours?” Angel blurted, stiffening with surprise.
Jack stilled, as if he knew something awful was coming. He eyed her a long, dry moment before repeating, “That’s what I said. Where’d you get it?”
“I found it,” she blurted.
“Where?”
“Where’d you lose it?”
“I didn’t. It was taken. Somebody took it. I haven’t seen it for nearly a year. My father gave it to me, and a similar one to Seth a long time—” He stopped, as if he’d just heard himself rambling on. Then his eyebrows veed down over his nose. “Dammit, Angel, spit it out. The day’s not getting any younger. Where’d you find it?”
“Just give me a minute, will you?” she crabbed, trying to hear herself saying In your father’s chest. “Take some time, and make sure it’s yours.” He opened his mouth, no doubt to protest, but Angel beat him to it. “Please,” she begged. “And I don’t say that often.”
Still annoyed, he neverthless complied, lowering his gaze to the knife he held, turning it over and over in his hands, running his fingers over the deadly weapon’s contours. Angel watched him. She’d expected him to say the knife was Seth’s. But it wasn’t. It was Jack’s. Obviously the medicine man’s vision hadn’t revealed this detail. To further forestall answering him, Angel avoided his gaze and set about rewrapping her belongings.
It wasn’t that she believed that Jack had killed his own father, she told herself. Because she didn’t. But it wouldn’t sit any easier with him, she knew, to learn that his knife had been used to kill the old man. A sudden low but hissing gasp, at just thinking the words, told her she couldn’t say them. She just couldn’t. Then she frowned, feeling her own eyebrows lower, her mouth pucker. This was just plain silly. Why can’t I? Why can’t I just spit the danged words out and be done with it?
Because … came the niggling response trying to worm its way into her consciousness … you don’t want him to hurt anymore. Because you care. Angel’s hands fisted around her father’s old hat. She stared blindly at it. No. She refused to entertain the thought, refused to lend it credence. Hurriedly, she busied herself with rewrapping her belongings. Too soon done with her task, Angel turned back to Jack.
He was silently watching her now. Apparently had been for a while. She swallowed, flinching when he first spoke. “Well? For the third time, Angel, where’d you get this knife?”
His tone of voice brooked no argument, no further stalling. Finally, Angel said, “You might want to sit down first.”
He shook his head, looking pale and grim, like death warmed over. “No. Just tell me.”
“All right. I didn’t really find it, Jack. I … pulled it from your father’s chest. Seth—or whoever killed him—used your knife to do it.”
“Oh, Jesus,” was all he said. The knife fell from his hand, clattering harmlessly to the wood floor, and lay there, gleaming and deadly. As Angel watched him, feeling helpless, Jack again covered his face with his hands. Underneath his spread fingers she could see his reddening and contorted features.
Angel’s heart flipflopped. Her own features twisted with sympathy. Again, she put a hand out to him. But this time—unlike all the other times in her life when she’d wanted to reach out, but had always stopped herself before the need became an act—she didn’t pull back. This time, she didn’t think of herself, didn’t guard her heart against being turned aside. No, this time she allowed herself to reach out to another human being. To offer solace, comfort … understanding. She took a risk with her heart. She touched his sleeve. “Jack?”
In the next blurred instant, without really knowing how it h
appened, she was a captive in his embrace … pulled up against his chest and pressed tightly against him from her head to her toes. His arms wrapped around her back and her waist, capturing her hair. Angel circled his muscled neck with her own arms. Nothing had ever felt so right before. She melted against him, gave herself over to him, gave herself up to the safety, the warmth, the strength of his arms.
His face nestled in the crook of her neck and shoulder. He couldn’t seem to get close enough to her, either. Acting out of her own need, as much as his, Angel clung to him, held his head to her, threaded her fingers through the black waves of his hair. And crooned, “It’s all right, Jack. It’s going to be all right. I’m right here.”
He stilled, as if listening. And then … he cried. Great wrenching sobs tore from him, he clutched at her, at her clothing. His hands kneaded her back, fisted around her hair. Sweating with grief, with torn emotions, he pulled her closer … his warmth and his brokenness tearing at Angel’s long-denied heart. Tears invaded her eyes. She blinked them back, refused to think why—or for whom—she would be shedding tears. After all, she was doing this for him. This big, strong, fine man was undone. Not her.
Unbidden, her mother’s words came to her. Virginia had always said a broken heart could hold more love. Angel could never understand that … until now. Now she knew. A broken heart was open, so it had more room. A broken heart understood … and responded.
After a few more moments, he quieted, and pulled away, his hands gripping her waist, his forehead resting against her collarbone. Angel pulled back, too. Cupping his face with her hands and lifting his head from her tear-soaked shoulder, she looked into his face. She wanted to tell him again it would be all right. Or perhaps she wanted to see for herself that he would be all right.
But he stared down at her, his blue eyes bloodshot, and spoke first, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Oh, God, Angel, I’m so sorry.”
Captive Angel Page 20
