Foolishly, he’d been staring out at the violet-and-peach streaks of clouds silhouetted across the robin’s-egg blue sky. Worse yet, he’d even been admiring and soaking up the deep evergreen colors of ponderosa pines and the wispy light tan of aspens.
Foolish of him to be enjoying it so much. Because the very minute he thought of how wonderful it was to be able to see such a sight, his eyesight failed him again.
Thrown once more into the black hole of blindness, Ben was left with only the memories. And the very first memory to surface from the recesses of his mind was of cobalt sparks, flaming from soft gray-blue eyes.
He flashed right back to the dim light of early morning. To the point when he’d regained his sight and had focused on watching Tory’s reactions as he made love to her.
The rose flush of her cheeks as her passion hit had sent him to a higher place. The pale golden beauty of the tender skin on her rib cage. The hidden treasures of reddish-brown freckles that he’d discovered secreted on her mid-back—all were wondrous sights he would never forget.
The flashbacks grew more intimate and took him back to whispered sighs and tender caresses. To heated gasps when the electricity singed them both. To her salty, honey and tangy tastes.
And finally, to shadowed smiles, ear-blasting shrieks and soothing embraces as their breaths mingled in the aftershocks.
Hell. He couldn’t see a damned thing at this point. It would be crazy for him to continue hiding it from the Brotherhood. They needed to know now that he was not as capable of helping out as he had been before.
“I have an eye disease that is growing worse,” he told Lucas. “Soon I may not be able to see at all.”
“I know.” Lucas Tso, a tall, lean Navajo with an artistic temperament and a fierce loyalty to the Brotherhood, drove on without turning. “I have sensed your new impairment on occasion. But it changes little when it comes to our war with the Skinwalkers. In fact, it may make you more alert to the dangers around you.”
“I believe it’s more of a weakness than you think,” Ben told him. “I can’t see a thing right now. How will I be able to help question the Yellow House Clan relatives of that teenager who died?”
“You will listen. Listen for truth. Listen for small discrepancies and for uncomfortable silences.
“The heart of the Brotherhood dwells in empathy,” Lucas continued. “You must learn to judge without seeing who could be the true enemy. The evil ones lurk in seeming innocence around you. Use your other senses to find them.”
Yes, well, he was becoming better and better at using some of those other senses. In fact, it took every power he could muster to keep from thinking about how those other senses had been engaged just last night. But there was no question at all of Tory being the enemy. Not a possibility.
Ben sat back in the seat and let the hot wind from the open pickup window blow against his face. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the smell of creosote and thick red earth.
He would do what he could. Be what he could be. That was the Navajo Way.
And he would absolutely stop being so absorbed by the colors in the strands of cornsilk hair or in a pair of intelligent, flashing eyes.
Tory headed for the break room at the end of her shift. She hoped to find a message on her e-mail from the other former professor she’d contacted about help for Ben.
Her pharmacology professor had already answered and said he knew of no studies being done for a cure of azoor disease. He had added something else interesting, though. It seemed he had heard rumors from a buddy who worked for an international drug company. The rumor concerned a secret cure for some deadly disease that had supposedly been discovered by a research lab on the Navajo reservation.
The drug-world blogs and grapevines were all abuzz. Doubts and misgivings aside, it seemed the drug company was about to pay big bucks for more research. Interesting, but of no help for Ben.
She stuck her head through the break-room door, hoping for a chance at the computer to see if her Pathology of Rare Eye Diseases professor had gotten back to her yet. But instead of an empty room she found nurse Russel, sitting in front of the computer with his back to her.
“Excuse me, Russel, but I’m leaving for the day. You should be happy, too, because I’m going home long before dark.”
He jerked as if he’d been shot, quickly flipped off the computer screen as though he wanted to hide what he’d been doing and swiveled his chair around so he could glare at her. “Fine, Dr. Sommer. Good evening.”
It made her more than a little curious, wondering what he might’ve been looking at online. “What were you just doing?” she asked and stepped closer to him. “You weren’t contacting a specialist concerning a patient, were you? I haven’t seen any charts for anyone whose condition might need a consultation. Did I miss something?”
He straightened his back and narrowed his eyes. “Not at all. I was just doing a bit of personal research. Nothing to concern yourself over.” Lifting his head, he stared down his beak of a nose and pinned her in his black gaze.
Holy crap. April had been right. Russel did look like a bird of prey getting ready to pounce on a meal.
Only the kind of fowl he resembled was more along the lines of a ferocious black raven. The glare in those beady dark eyes of his reminded her instantly of the sight of an odd raven as it had perched on the roof of Ben’s house.
It sent a shiver down her spine. “I…uh…I won’t be coming in much for the next few weeks,” she managed to stutter as she took a step backward.
“No? I assume Dr. Hardeen has approved your request for time off.”
“It’s not any of your business, but no, I’m not taking time off. I’ll be helping Dr. Wauneka out with a few things at his clinic.”
“I see.” Russel swirled his chair toward the computer screen again. “If you were thinking of asking if we’ll be okay without you, the answer is yes. We’ll be fine here.”
He dismissed her by keeping his back turned. “Just remember my advice, Doctor, and stay off the roads at night.”
Son of a…
Damn, was she ever glad she wouldn’t be dealing with arrogant, creepy Russel for the next few weeks. She stormed down the corridor as fast as she could go.
But the minute she cleared the outside door and headed into the warmth of the late-afternoon sun, she thought about facing a steel-edged Navajo doctor whose warm brown eyes refused to focus. And decided that might be every bit as difficult to do. But in a different way.
She’d barely climbed into the driver’s seat of Ben’s SUV and shut the door behind her when her purse started ringing. Or rather, her brand-new cell phone must’ve been ringing.
Digging the jangling thing out of her purse, she found the talk button and pushed. “Hello?”
“Ya’at’eeh, Doctor. This is the Plant Tender calling. There is still plenty of light. Would you have the time now for a lesson?”
Shirley Nez. The woman’s generous warm smile came through, even on the phone.
“I have time. But I don’t know yet if Ben will need me to give him a ride home, or if I’ll have to give him a place to stay for the night. Maybe I should call—”
“The doctor will not be going home tonight—the road to his house is still unpassable. And he has made arrangements to stay with cousins for the evening. You are free to learn.”
Trying to stifle a disappointed groan, Tory took the directions for getting to Shirley’s house and hung up.
Freedom was the one thing she’d had plenty of since the very first day she left home for college. Free to come and go. Free to work from dawn to dawn and as hard as any man. Free to break any personal commitments that didn’t suit her lifestyle.
And free to know icy isolation and to be all alone.
She was there, in his dreams, the minute he finally fell off to sleep. It wasn’t so much the sight of her as it was her essence that captured Ben’s midnight hours.
It had a been a frustrating day of getting no answ
ers. But the night was proving to be just as frustrating.
With hot, shaking-the-bed and roll-around dreams, he’d awoken several times hard and sweaty—and furious with himself. He could see her so clearly, with that blond hair streaming down and tickling his stomach as she leaned over him. See her with perfect vision, digging her nails into his arms as he had used them to pin hers over her head so he could dip into her tastes once more.
He wasn’t sure he’d really seen any of it. Or if all the images had been burned into his mind by the intensity of their union.
Had he really seen her licking her lips in anticipation of kissing his erection? Had he really beheld the gleam in her eyes as she fit him inside and let her internal muscles suck him ever deeper?
Sitting straight up in his cousin Lucas’s spare bed, he was embarrassed by his current physical condition. Good thing he was alone. He’d been so close to losing the ultimate control, right here, all alone.
Ben flipped on his stomach and pounded the pillow into flattened submission. No fair. The one woman who he could’ve found a real spiritual and physical connection to had to be an Anglo.
Figured. A doctor without sight. A crystal gazer without vision. A warrior without the ability to see the enemy.
Why the hell shouldn’t he also be the man who’d found a perfect lover but would forever be unable to have her?
Sighing, he knew there would be no more sleeping for him tonight.
Exhausted from listening to Shirley’s lessons and trying to memorize both plant lore and the Navajo words, Tory got ready for bed. But after she’d brushed her teeth, shut off the lights and headed down the hall, she knew it would be impossible to sleep in that bed tonight.
Too many hot memories and warm feelings for her to go into her own bedroom.
Making a U-turn before stepping through the door, she found her way in the dark to the suede couch in her great room. Afraid to close her eyes for fear she would remember everything—much too clearly—she curled up and pulled an afghan over her legs.
Sighing, she stared out into the black stillness of her house. And knew there would be no sleeping for her tonight.
11
A week later Tory glanced up into Ben’s eyes and knew his vision had returned—for the moment.
But the lines around those beautiful chocolate eyes of his had grown deeper in the last few days, and the grooves across his forehead were more furrowed and narrowed to a point between his eyebrows. He looked as tired as she felt.
It made her wonder if he’d been sleeping well. She knew she hadn’t been. She’d been commuting the hour and a half both ways up here to his mountain clinic every day, and then spending every extra minute of the late afternoons with Shirley Nez. Exhausted, Tory ought to be tired enough to collapse into bed at night and be asleep before her head hit the pillow.
She wasn’t. Tossing and turning and worrying about Ben made up most of her dark-time hours. What was he doing or not doing that was causing his current exhausted look?
She’d always been able to look as if she was handling the loss of a little sleep. Ben, on the other hand, appeared stressed and tense—and worried.
What had done that to him? His off-and-on blindness that seemed less and less likely for a reprieve?
Or was there something more? Certainly he couldn’t be feeling the same irritating exasperation at the unwanted memories of one wild night as she was. It was a single night, for heaven’s sake. Lots of people had one-night stands and kept on working together. She’d seen it done dozens of times back at the hospital in Chicago.
Of course, she’d also seen an occasional explosion of feelings from such pairings that ruined careers and sent one or more of the participants off to distant places in order to get away from the embarrassment. But that wouldn’t apply to her and Ben. She simply refused to let one night and lots of confusing feelings stop her from helping him and trying to be his friend.
She needed him—to teach her about living and working with the Dine—almost as much as he needed her to guide him through his darkness. So some small tension between them could not stop them from working together.
Or from searching for answers to his cure. That was what she did, after all. She tended people and found ways of making them better.
Nothing had materialized on the cure front yet. But the biggest setback to her plans had been discovering that she quaked every time he had to take her hand. And that happened a lot in order for her to guide him. She also continued to be damned unhappy about feeling anxious and itchy whenever they were in close quarters.
Like they were right now, standing hip to hip and bandaging a young boy who had been mauled by a dog. But the ten-year-old’s sutures were already in place. The tetanus shot and a first rabies vaccination had been administered, and the boy’s trauma was nearing an end.
“I’ve got this,” he told her. “Can you go calm down his aunt? I’ll be able to get to her in a minute or two.”
Tory nodded, and was pleased to know he saw her do it. She was also pleased to be able to converse with the middle-aged woman on the bench outside by way of a few Navajo words. She’d learned quite a lot in the last week. Just a few well-chosen phrases, said correctly, went a long way toward making Ben’s patients feel more comfortable with her.
When Tory stepped out past the blanketed door, she found the woman collapsed on the ground. Tory quickly checked her pulse and respiration. The woman’s heart was pounding but her breathing seemed normal.
Tory turned back to the door and called for Ben’s help. Between them, they got the woman into the medicine hogan and laid her on an examining table as she began to come back to consciousness.
It only took a few minutes of examination for Tory to diagnose the woman as probably having hyperventilated, worrying about her nephew. Her blood pressure was slightly elevated, her pupils still dilated. But she was calming now and should be okay in a few minutes.
Making a decision based on a week’s worth of watching Ben work with patients, Tory decided to remain silent and let him do the talking. It was entirely possible the woman had low blood sugar and Ben already knew she should be watched more closely.
“What happened to you?” he asked the woman who was now sitting up.
“It’s my heart. The boy and I…we have the ghost sickness.”
“Your nephew was attacked by a vicious dog. It was a dog, wasn’t it?”
The woman nodded her head. “Yes, while we were out with my brother’s sheep this morning. But it was a dog witch. It disappeared right away.”
Tory saw the woman go pale, reaching for her heart, so she stepped closer to her side. Was there some real underlying illness here? The woman’s heart sounded strong enough. But Tory put her arm around her shoulder, giving her support.
“Please get Mrs. Yellowhorse a drink of water,” Ben asked Tory.
She backed away from the patient and did as he requested.
“I am going to check you over,” he told the woman. “The crystal will tell us if this is ghost sickness or not. What do you believe the two of you have done to deserve to be witched?”
Mrs. Yellowhorse’s eyes grew wide. “We…it was an accident. A few days ago. We were searching for one of the lost lambs in an arroyo near Tocito Wash. It is one my brother does not usually use for sheep. My nephew and I hadn’t intended to disturb the—Wolf.”
Tory saw Ben’s sudden stillness. Heard his slight intake of breath. And couldn’t imagine what had been said that seemed so strange to him. Wild animals like a wolf must be a rather common sight out in these remote wilderness areas. Was he concerned the woman was developing an acute form of mental illness or hysteria?
Ben reached for one of his crystals, the ones she’d seen him use once or twice before to soothe an elderly patient. “You saw the Navajo Wolf?” he asked gently. “Did he threaten you? Touch you?”
The woman shook her head. “No, but he came near enough to see. We heard him talk. Saw that he had—destroyed the lamb.”
She shivered at the memory. “We left quickly, but the damage was already done.”
Tory stood quietly while Ben looked through the large clear crystal and ran it over the woman’s chest area. The patient lay very still and waited for him to make a diagnosis.
Surprised to see him surreptitiously watching the woman’s respiration and reflexes as he moved the crystal around, Tory remained quiet as Ben drew the glass back and forth from her heart to head. With the crystal hovering about two inches above the patient’s clothing, Ben kept speaking softly in Navajo words Tory didn’t understand.
The entire process took about fifteen minutes.
Finally Ben lifted his chin and smiled at Mrs. Yellowhorse. “You do not have ghost sickness, but you are troubled and the dark wind is affecting your heart. I will speak to a hataalii on your behalf. You and the boy need a full Blessing Way ceremony.”
The woman managed a sharp nod and squeezed her eyes closed.
“But while you are here,” Ben continued gently, “I’ll perform a Song of Blessing and will give you both Life Way medicines. They’ll help bring you peace until the longer ceremony can be arranged.”
Those words appeared to have an immediate calming effect on the woman. She uncrunched her face and her skin began to lose its gray pallor as the cheeks took on a touch of real color. Ben asked Tory to wait outside while he performed his ceremony.
Tory sat on the benches by the door, and listened as Ben chanted in a low voice. The ceremony lasted slightly under an hour. Meanwhile, she raised her face to the warmth of the sun and watched while a couple of big birds circled gracefully high in the sky overhead.
Sitting there, she had plenty of time to think about dog witches and Navajo wolves. To think about the power of the mind both to cause illness and to cure it.
But there was also way too much time for her to worry about a hard-steeled but gentle man who knew how to make people well—but who couldn’t cure his own looming illness.
And it made her almost weep in frustration.
Books by Linda Conrad Page 46
