by Joanne Pence
But then, one night, after the children had gone to sleep, Taishi took his wife to his futon. Their love-making was even more passionate than usual.
When it was over, Taishi lay on his side and gazed at her with adoring love as a stream of moonlight fell on Rachel's face. He leaned close, kissed her, and said, "To see you lying there with the light on you reminds me of a strange thing that happened when I was but a boy of eighteen. No one could ever be as beautiful as you are, but the strange woman I met back then came the closest. She was radiant—just as you are in this moonlight. Indeed, when I think of her now, she seems very much like you.”
Without facing him, Rachel whispered, "Tell me about her. Where did you see her?"
Taishi told her about the terrible night in the ferryman's hut, and how old Mosaku had died in the freezing cold. But then he spoke of the Snow Woman who had held him, loved him, and kept him warm and safe through the night. "Asleep or awake,” he said, “that was the only time I ever saw a being who came close to your beauty. Of course, she was not human; and I was afraid of her, very much afraid. Indeed, I have often thought she must have been some kind of demon.”
At those words, Rachel jumped up from the futon, loomed over Taishi, and shrieked at him. "You fool! That woman was me! O-Yuki!”
He stared a moment, then whispered, “No, O-Yuki. What are you saying?”
“I told you then that I would kill you if you ever said one word about it!”
He looked at her with horror as he remembered those very words spoken by the Snow Woman. “Please, you wouldn’t…”
She was beside herself with fury. “But for the children asleep in this house, I would kill you this very moment! And now you had better take very, very good care of them. If, for any reason, they complain about you, I will not hesitate to kill you as I said I would, just as I killed old Mosaku that night so many years ago."
“It can’t be true,” Taishi cried, as tears rolled down his cheeks. “You aren’t her, and you aren’t a killer. Some madness has come over you! I love you, O-Yuki.”
Listening to his plea, her expression went from anger to sorrow. Soon, her own tears fell. “Why did you do it, Taishi? Why didn’t you keep your promise to your wife, your demon?” As she spoke, her voice became thin, like a crying of the wind. Slowly, she melted into a bright white mist that spired up to the roof-beams, and then vanished into nothing.
Chapter 41
The mountain offered them no cover. Michael grabbed Ceinwen and pulled her with him toward the upslope, and the two lay flat. Jianjun followed.
Jake and the other deputy, Rosenfeld, had drawn their sidearms as they dropped to the ground and tried to figure out where the shot had come from.
“Drop your weapons,” a voice shouted from below. They couldn’t see him. “We don’t want to kill anyone else. We only want the pearl.”
Deputy Grayson had carried a rifle, one Jake and Rosenfeld might need. Rosenfeld made a sudden break for it, but as he ran, a shot was heard and he fell, hit in the leg.
“We warned you!” the voice said.
Jake saw that the shot came out of a patch of sagebrush on the downside of the mountain. He returned fire over and over. As he did, Michael crept then sprinted toward the rifle, picked it up and ran to Jake’s side, diving for cover as rifle shots from below filled the air.
“The warnings go both ways,” Jake called. “Show yourself.”
“Look back here,” yelled a different voice. “And if you shoot, those two will die.”
Jake and Michael looked behind them. On rocks high overhead, two men stood, one with a long rifle, the other with a crossbow, aimed at Ceinwen and Jianjun. The men wore hats, dark glasses, and what—even from a distance—looked like fake beards.
“Here I am.” A tall, stocky fellow stood up from behind the large sagebrush where he’d crouched and now walked toward them, the stock of his rifle at his shoulder and a finger near the trigger. He wore a green baseball cap, dark glasses and had a beard. But his beard was graying and looked real. “Now, toss the pearl this way, along with your rifle and guns, then my men and I will go. If not, we can always shoot you and take the pearl, anyway.”
“How do you know about the pearl?” Michael called.
“I’d say that’s the least of your worries.”
“If your men shoot, you won’t make it off this hill alive,” Jake said.
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m counting on you fellows to be reasonable.” His voice was gruff, but had a cloying, whiny quality to it. “Is some pearl worth all your lives? And mine, too? I don’t think so. Toss it down! Or you—”
From behind them, Michael and Jake heard a series of shots. They turned their heads to see as the spokesman stopped talking and stared past them.
Ceinwen was firing a 9 mm. Above her, one of the two gunmen dropped his rifle, clutched at his midsection, lurched forward, and fell. The other began firing wildly at Ceinwen and Jianjun, hitting Jianjun, before running for the cover of nearby heavy brush.
Michael turned from the gun battle on the upper slope to the spokesman who recovered his wits and took aim at Ceinwen. Michael raised his rifle and fired. Surprise and anger flared on the gunman’s face as he turned to run for the dense sagebrush. He seemed to stagger, than stumbled into the brush in full flight.
“God damn, I think you winged that running-off-the-mouth bastard,” Jake yelled.
“Yeah, I hope so,” Michael growled.
“Hey, up here!” Ceinwen was shouting. “I’ve got two wounded!”
As they heard horses riding away, they ran up the slope as Jake groused about the ones that got away.
Michael rushed to the wounded Jianjun. The shot to his back hit his lower rib cage. He was bleeding and unconscious.
Ceinwen had removed Deputy Rosenfeld’s belt and wrapped it around his leg as a tourniquet.
“I’m sorry,” Ceinwen said to Jake as she pulled the strap tight. “Maybe I’ve watched too many American shoot-’em-ups, but when I realized Jianjun, who was shielding me, had a revolver, and no one expected that I’d know how to use it. I saw a chance and took it.”
“There’s nothing,” Jake said as he gawked at her, “to be sorry about.”
Jake used his satellite phone to call Mallick and get a Medivac helicopter to fly out to help the wounded and retrieve the dead. At the same time, Michael and Ceinwen compressed Jianjun’s wound to try to stop the bleeding.
A little more than an hour later, the helicopter arrived.
Jake rode in it with his men and Jianjun, giving Ceinwen the keys to drive his truck back to Salmon. He could scarcely speak over the death and the serious wounding of his deputies.
Michael was also devastated. He remained quiet as he and Ceinwen made their way back to the fire trail where they had left their vehicles.
“There was nothing else you could have done,” she said, after a long while.
“I should have come here alone.”
“And then you’d be dead.”
“The deputy had a wife and kids. I’ve got … no one.”
Ceinwen’s breath caught at the bleakness of his words and the sadness with which he spoke them. “I know one thing for sure,” she said. “Those weren’t demons shooting at us. Some very human person wants that pearl. Who could it be? Who knows we’re out here?”
He shook his head. “It’s got to be someone following my movements, someone who realizes I’ve decided to get the pearl, and that’s why I’m out here. But who? Those in Japan know I’ll bring the pearl to them.”
Ceinwen thought a moment. “You’d bring it to the Nakamuras. But what if some other person there wants it for himself? They knew what you were up to. They could easily have found a way to track your phone and then hire mercenaries to be ready to attack as soon as you retrieved the pearl. Who knows how many people Lady Nakamura told about all this.”
Michael nodded, lost in thought between what she was saying and the guilt weighing down on him, the guilt of being h
is father’s son.
They reached the vehicles and drove through the night to Salmon, stopping only for a couple of hours sleep before facing the long, winding road over the Bitterroot Mountains. They arrived in Salmon early the next morning.
Jake and Mallick were already at the sheriff’s station.
“How are they doing?” were Michael’s first words upon seeing Jake.
“Len Rosenfeld and his wife have gone to one of the hospitals in Boise, and Jianjun is being treated at the medical center, just a few blocks away. He had surgery, and the doc sounded pretty positive. A couple of ribs are worse for wear, but they deflected the bullet from hitting anything vital. But, good God, he lost a lot of blood.”
“I’m glad for the basically positive report,” Michael said, but then his shoulder sagged and he bowed his head. “I never meant to bring any of this on you. I’m so sorry.”
Jake gripped Michael's arm. “Whatever is going on started before you ever got here. You aren't to blame." He let go as he added, "We’ve had deaths, mutilations. We saw what was out there, human and … not. And like always, it's the human element that's the most dangerous. I can’t help but wonder if the things spooking us here in Salmon weren’t done by those shooters. The way they killed my deputy, a really good man, with no warning, nothing, shows pure viciousness. Plus, they had guns, supplies, horses. That isn’t the sort of thing they could get at a moment’s notice. It means they’ve been lurking around Idaho a while.”
“Good point,” Michael admitted.
“Damn straight. In fact, I’m thinking this was all a set-up. They were probably nearby, watching and waiting for you to come back to Salmon, somehow knowing you’d have to come back for the pearl. And when you did, they were ready.”
“But how did they know where we were going?” Ceinwen asked.
Jake shrugged. “As soon as I found out, I talked to the deputies who might have told their wives. I told Mallick, had to say a bit about where we were going to the INL to get the rare earth elements. Anyone could have told the wrong person or had their conversation overheard. It even”—he glanced quickly toward Ceinwen—“might have been one of us. Anyway, if those guys took a bush plane out of Salmon, they’d have arrived well before us and waited at Selway Falls. I’ll be checking small airfields around here for three or four men.”
“Four?”
“I figured there had to be four. Three do the dirty work, one to tend and protect the horses for a fast getaway, and to act as backup. Things happened too fast for him to get in on the action. A break for us.”
“Makes sense,” Michael said. “But I also know none of that would have happened if I hadn’t brought the pearl here to begin with. I honestly thought it would be safe since it’s surrounded by metals that are supposed to neutralize it.”
“But it’s not the demons in the pearl that have caused the problem,” Ceinwen pointed out. “It seems they were neutralized. So you weren’t wrong. The problem came from outside forces—from very human outside forces.”
Jake nodded in agreement. “That sounds right.”
“But you can’t deny there were also demonic forces out there,” Michael said.
“I don’t want to believe in such things,” Ceinwen said, “but I know what I saw attack me out there, and we know Rachel’s problems aren’t being caused by men on horseback in Idaho.”
She looked so forlorn, Michael found himself putting an arm around her shoulders and drawing her to his side. He then faced Jake. “We’re going to have to leave, Sheriff. Once the pearl is out of your state, I bet you’ll find things get a lot quieter here. But we’ll come back, and when we do, we’ll make whoever is behind this pay for all they’ve done.”
Jake nodded. “Just be careful.”
To both men’s surprise, Ceinwen gave Jake a quick hug. “You be careful, too, Sheriff. You’re a good man, even if you don’t know me well enough to trust me yet. And I’m sure she has not stopped loving you. Woman’s intuition.”
“I’m listening and hoping,” Jake said with a grin.
Chapter 42
Michael and Ceinwen learned Jianjun was still in the ICU after having had surgery, but they were able to talk to the doctor who performed it. He had repaired most of the bone, muscle, and nerve damage, and expected there would be little if any lasting damage to Jianjun. But the blood loss had weakened him, and his left side was going to be stiff and painful for some time to come.
He wasn't able to see non-family visitors until the next morning.
“I’m not leaving Salmon until I talk to Jianjun,” Michael said.
Ceinwen saw his heartbreak over his friend. “Of course,” she murmured. “Should you call his wife and let her know what’s happened?”
Michael thought a moment. “I’ll let Jianjun do that. But there is someone I should call.”
They left and ate breakfast at the coffee shop next door to the sheriff’s office, then booked rooms in the hotel where Ceinwen and Rachel had stayed. Michael didn’t want to impose on Jake’s hospitality any more than he already had. He knew Jake needed time alone to grieve for his friend.
They were both exhausted from their all-night drive back to Salmon. Michael said a quick goodbye to Ceinwen and went to his room.
Around ten that night, Ceinwen tapped lightly on the door to Michael’s hotel room.
He opened the door.
“I didn’t want to wake you if you were still sleeping,” she said, then held up two bottles, one of tequila, the other a Margarita mix. “But since you’re not, fancy a drink? I’ve come to like this mix. It’s not popular at all in Europe.”
“Sure. Come in. I even have a bucket of ice.” He took the bottles and mixed them both drinks.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’ve been better,” he admitted, handing her a glass.
She sat on the only chair in the small room while he took his glass and sat on the bed. “This is good,” she said after tasting the drink.
He nodded, but remained quiet.
“Do you have any idea who might be behind all this?” she asked.
“I do.” His voice was hushed.
“Do you want to tell me?”
He shook his head. “I’ll need some proof. Too many feelings and past history are involved to be objective. Right now, I have other things to think about, to worry about. Like will my best friend be all right? He still could get an infection. Did they get all the bone and bullet fragments? He could still die.”
“He’s in good hands,” she said. “And given the remoteness of the area, he was in the operating room surprisingly quickly. The doctor sounded confident that he’s got a good chance of coming out of this well.”
“I wish I could walk away from all this,” Michael murmured. “But when I try to, it follows me. If I was the one hurt, it would be fine. Instead, it’s people close to me.” Pain-filled eyes caught hers. “Never get close to me, Ceinwen. I’ll ruin your life. Trust me on that.”
She moved to his side on the bed and placed her hand on his arm. “You've brought on none of this.”
He stood. He needed to keep away from her, away from her touch. He took a few more steps and then faced her again, his mouth firm. “I’d like you to leave—not only me, not only Salmon, but all this. Go home. I’ll do what I can for Rachel and Seiji—if there’s anything to be done.”
“Home? Where’s home for me, Michael?” She asked. “All I know is I’m here now, with you. And it’s where I want to be.”
He shook his head. “Too many people around me die, Ceinwen. You need to understand that.”
“No.” She walked up to him, green eyes capturing his. “I understand that you’re afraid. So am I. But my fear isn’t because of demons. It’s because of you.”
“Don’t.” He lifted his hands as if to push her away, but instead, she took hold of them, intertwining her fingers with his. Then she lowered their hands as she stepped closer and kissed him lightly.
“Ceinwen, y
ou don’t want this.”
She let go of his hands and raised hers to his shoulders. “But I do.”
He couldn’t resist and kissed her as gently as she had him, planning to then back away and show her the door.
But her arms slid around his neck and she pressed the soft contours of her body against his as she briefly touched her lips to his. The feel of her, her taste, everything about her in his arms, was even better than he had imagined.
Just one more kiss, he told himself, letting his arms circle her.
And soon, he had neither the strength nor the will to push her away again.
Chapter 43
The next morning, Michael and Ceinwen went straight to the hospital. Jianjun was sitting up in the bed.
“How are you feeling?” Michael asked, after their greeting.
“Like I’ve been hit by a truck. It’s amazing what one little bullet can do.”
“Thank goodness it wasn’t a lot worse,” Ceinwen said.
“And thank you for being our own Annie Oakley,” he said.
“Annie … ah, your Wild West sharpshooter,” Ceinwen said. “I do believe I like that comparison!”
Jianjun and Michael smiled. “Good,” Jianjun said, then heaved a sigh. “At least some day this big scar on my side might look kind of cool. And I can tell all sorts of tall tales to wow the ladies.”
Michael chuckled, glad his friend could joke.
“So,” Jianjun said. “What now?”
“We go back to Japan,” Michael said.
“And what about whoever is behind those hit men?”
“I’m working on it.”
Jianjun nodded. “I wish I could go to Japan with you, boss. The doctors say I’ll be laid up for at least a week or two. Two days here, but then I need bed rest, some light activity, and not to do anything that might cause internal stitches to tear or infect the wound.”
