Books by Linda Conrad

by Conrad, Linda

  Cisco touched the bandage on his forehead under the cap. He’d forgotten all about the wound and thought the dressing had been covered over by the shadow of the brim. How had Lucas Tso spotted it?

  He looked over to Sunnie. “Is that guy for real?”

  “Oh, yeah. Quite real. But you don’t want to know all the things he can do.”

  No, Cisco thought not. Whatever Lucas could do would probably sound like a fairy tale—or a nightmare. And right now Cisco needed all his senses and a good dose of reality. A murder had been committed. A murder that might have been caused by an evil human who could change himself into the form of an animal with supernatural powers.

  Add to that fantastic tale the ridiculous yet sublime pull Cisco felt coming from Sunnie, and he was already in fantasyland. She was a woman of secrets. But the strength inside her glowed right through her skin to drive him crazy. Even with irritation written on her face, she was as beautiful as a work of art and as sexy as hell.

  He’d meant every word he’d said to her. Before this day was through, they would know each other much more intimately.

  That was just about all the fantasy he could stand for the moment.

  Sunnie sat in the passenger seat freezing her tail off. It was getting colder. She’d hoped, since the winds had temporarily died down, the afternoon temperatures would’ve warmed up some. But no such luck.

  Wishing for a car with a top and a decent heater, she wondered why she’d ever picked an old, open Jeep to drive. Oh, yeah, she remembered now. Money. She’d needed a four-wheel-drive vehicle that could take her everyplace in Dinetah she wanted to go. And she’d wanted something that wouldn’t stand out and bring her unwanted attention. The Jeep was all she could afford at the time.

  Cisco drove them up to a crossroads and stopped. “Where to? You want to go back to your place so I can do more work on the computer?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet.”

  From the instant he’d pushed them into the crevice and given her that drugging kiss she’d known what their next stop alone would mean. The way her body had quivered in response to him was clear. Her aroused state had been so immediate and so fierce she’d had to push him away or succumb to the desire right there in the boulder’s shadow. Annoyance had saved her that time, but she knew their moment was near.

  “Let’s go over the pass to Raven Wash Clinic. Get Ben to take out your sutures.”

  Cisco threw her an icy glance. “The damn wound is fine. If the sutures need to come out, I can do it myself. I wasn’t too crazy about that veiled threat from Lucas Tso. I’m not leaving the reservation until I finish my investigation. None of the Brotherhood is exactly at the top of my good list at the moment.”

  “Oh, please, Mr. Macho. You need a doctor to judge how well the wound is healing. Lucas Tso is known to be right about things most of the time. If it’s infected, you might need antibiotics. You can’t very well continue your investigation if you’re too sick with a fever or in the hospital on an IV drip.”

  Scowling, Cisco grudgingly agreed. She gave him driving directions, then folded her arms around her body for warmth and sat back.

  It was a good thing Cisco hadn’t wanted to hear about all the things Lucas could do. Some of them, like talking to the birds and receiving answers, were so beyond belief she barely accepted them herself. And she’d actually seen them.

  Lucas Tso was a good man—she knew that, too. An artist and silversmith, he’d been known as a sensitive, one who could see others’ thoughts. That is, he had been until his new wife, Teal, had shown up on the reservation. Things changed for him then. As they’d fallen in love, Lucas saw into people’s minds less and less. Today he still could read people better than most, but the thoughts of others were now blocked to him.

  He was still the only Brotherhood member who spoke the language of the Bird People. And the birds were great allies of the Navajo in their struggles against the Skinwalkers. His skill and his gentle kindness made Lucas one of her favorite people.

  Another turn at the junction near the Lukachukai Chapter House brought them to the slow climb up and over the Chuska Mountains. Sunnie both loved and hated this route. It wasn’t one she traveled often. The haunting beauty of the sheer drop-offs and gigantic boulders, along with the spicy scent of ponderosa and piñons, always made her melancholy as she wished for things that could not be.

  Her father’s mother had once lived in these mountains. Sunnie’s happy memories of being a girl and traveling with her beloved father to visit her anali always ended, like every other thought of her father, in the violence and pain of watching him die.

  Light snowflakes began to fall as the Jeep neared the peak of the pass. Staying warm became her newest obsession. She fiddled with the heater.

  “Do you have some other vehicle to drive during the winter months?” Cisco asked.

  Shaking her head, she decided to have a little fun and annoy him again. Purely out of a desperate need to alleviate the painful thoughts, of course.

  “Wussing out on me, Naakaii? You wouldn’t think a dash of cold weather could faze a man with so much heat and passion bottled up inside that he can’t keep his hands to himself.”

  Grabbing the steering wheel in a white-knuckle grip, Cisco scowled over at her. The searing-hot gaze was back in his eyes, so intense and obviously sexual it caused her breath to hitch in her throat. She’d better learn to stop teasing the man.

  “Tell me you don’t like my hands on you,” he began in a voice lowered to steely softness. “Tell me you don’t want me as much as I want you, and then I’ll start keeping my hands to myself.”

  His scowl turned to a seductive smile, so intimate and sensual she felt herself trembling inside. Why had she pushed him? What on earth had gotten into her?

  As clumps of new wet snow began to stick to everything in sight, Sunnie vowed to put her mind back on the prize. The Navajo Wolf’s death was her real goal. Giving in to desire with Cisco was nothing but a minor detour. Passion with him could only be an indulgence and would mean time away from the hunt she simply couldn’t afford.

  The incompetence of his men brought out fury in the Navajo Wolf. But anger would cause only further damage to his sick body. He had no time left to waste and no strength available to force his will.

  “Why haven’t you translated those parchments?” he demanded of the Owl. “If you’re having so much trouble, just bring me that Brotherhood warrior Michael Ayze. He’s always been the smartest one over there at the Dine College—unlike you, Owl.”

  The Wolf’s words were designed to nip at the pride of the Dine college professor who turned himself into the Skinwalker Burrowing Owl. But maybe the man known to the Navajo world as Professor Richard Yellowhorse, assistant and friend to the brilliant Michael Ayze, needed a bigger shove in the right direction. If it was the last act of the dying Navajo Wolf, he would make this lazy bastard Owl do what he’d promised and obtain the translations.

  The Burrowing Owl watched his superior closely, gritted his teeth and held his tongue. How he would love to shove a knife into the evil heart of the Wolf and be done with it. It would be a pleasure to see the end of the grand master of the Skinwalkers. But the time was not right. There were too many loose ends still flapping in the breeze and inviting trouble.

  “The Brotherhood members have found ways to shield themselves from our magic,” he finally said as an answer to the Wolf. “They are too powerful for us to capture.”

  “There should be a way to blackmail or bribe them, then,” the Wolf argued. “I must have Ayze to make those translations. Find a weak link. How about Ayze’s new bride? The one who speaks to ghosts. Capture her and Ayze will do as we wish.”

  The Owl shook his head. What an idiot the Wolf had become. “That woman is shielded by the ancestors. No evil can break through their spiritual power.”

  The Wolf waved away his objections. “One of the other women, then. There must be one that isn’t always guarded and may be approached. One tha
t all the Brotherhood would gladly die to save.”

  There was one woman, the Owl thought, who might be easier to capture. Now that she had come to mind, he was also sure her kidnapping would bring Michael Ayze and the others to heel. Not a half-bad idea even if it had been the Wolf’s.

  The Owl would put a plan in motion to reach the woman. And, meanwhile, he was still trying to get a handle on the dark stranger. Earlier he’d gotten the glimmer of an idea as to where he might be able to pick up the man’s trail.

  They knew the stranger had been injured in a shooting that first night. There had been blood in his car. And the Owl had a pretty good idea where a man who was not a Skinwalker might go to find help with his injury.

  Chapter 9

  T heir road wound over the rocky mountaintop and snaked down through pines on the western slope. The snowfall was thick and numbing, but ice and sleet had not formed at this altitude yet. The four-wheel drive still gave the tires a good grip against the crunchy new flakes. Cisco supposed things could be worse.

  Then they were worse. Seeing ahead became problematic. The ancient windshield wipers could barely keep up with the accumulation of fresh snow. Maybe as they dropped in elevation the heavy precipitation would level off to a manageable level. Much more of the stuff at this rate, and they would have to shovel their way down the mountain.

  A blast of arctic wind sent stinging, frosty snow sliding down the back of his neck. Uncomfortable and getting wetter by the minute, Cisco checked on Sunnie in the seat beside him.

  Her body shook uncontrollably as she tried to protect herself from the bitter and biting wind by pulling her coat collar up and scrunching down in the seat. He needed to get her out of this storm in a hurry.

  “Is there someplace where we can find shelter and warm up?” he asked over the wind’s roar.

  “There used to be a trading post at Red Rock that served coffee,” she mumbled in a barely audible voice as she shivered in the frigid air. “Another five miles ahead. But I’m not sure it’s still there. It’s been a long time since I’ve come this way.”

  Cisco hoped they could find that place or another soon, because he wasn’t sure she would make it much farther. By the time he’d spotted the Red Rock road sign, the snow had actually quit falling but the winds had picked up even more. Drifts were blowing over the roads, and seeing was next to impossible. Sunnie’s exposed skin was developing an unhealthy blue tinge.

  He located the old trading post sign, but the place looked deserted. Next to it he noticed a gas station with lights still on in the gloom of the late-afternoon storm. That would have to do.

  After he parked, they stepped out into half a foot of sloppy snow, and Sunnie yelled to him over the wind.

  “There’s a tarp and blanket. Let’s cover the seats.”

  He would rather not have taken the time. But she insisted, reaching into a compartment and tugging a tarp free. Helping Sunnie cover the front seats with the heavy plastic tarp and watching her shiver, Cisco made a quick decision that the blanket would not be used as an additional Jeep top and was going inside with them.

  In sixty seconds he had the heavy Navajo blanket in hand and hustled them both into the station.

  The lone attendant took one look at Sunnie and not only offered them coffee but also volunteered to share his hot supper. Cisco found them a couple of stools at the single counter filled with newspapers. He shoved the papers out of the way and wrapped the blanket around Sunnie as she sat.

  Within ten minutes the coffee had warmed them up enough so that Sunnie’s shivering had stopped. The attendant was in a back room, nuking his posole supper and splitting it up three ways.

  “I don’t like the idea of eating that man’s supper,” Sunnie mumbled over the rim of her paper coffee cup. “If you’re hungry, you should just stick to eating chips or crackers from the snack machines.”

  “Hunger isn’t the point. You need sustenance and something hot to warm you from the inside out. Don’t insult the man by turning down his offer and making yourself sick.”

  She frowned and finished her coffee. He could see the irritation written over her face once again. But, hell, was she trying to kill herself? She didn’t have near enough fat on her body to stay out in the glacial air as long as she had. It seemed to Cisco a matter of life or death to raise her body temperature as quickly as possible.

  After the attendant brought bowls of piping-hot stew and warm corn tortillas, he left them alone to eat. Cisco watched Sunnie choke down a couple of bites and then lower her plastic spoon. He offered her a tortilla and waited until she took a bite before he ate anything himself.

  Perhaps he should try talking in order to take her mind off the food so she would absently eat more. The last time he’d tried such a thing, it had worked fairly well. Her talking—not his, of course. He thought of several questions she had never answered.

  The one that came out of his mouth first surprised him. “You said once you’d been engaged but that it ended badly. Tell me what happened.”

  “What—now?” Her eyes shone with something that might have been amusement. Or maybe she was feverish.

  He picked up her spoon, dipped it into the stew and held it out to her. “Why not? Take another bite and then talk to me while you continue eating.”

  Sunnie ate the spoonful as he’d asked but wondered if she was up to rehashing the old wounds. When she looked into Cisco’s sympathetic eyes, though, she saw a gentleness, a warmth. It almost threw her off. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt as though someone was trying to comfort her and cushion her pain.

  She flashed back to the time when she’d first become engaged and thought her world was finally going in the right direction. Good-looking Louis Singleton, the athletic director at the local high school, had been quite a catch for a motherless young nurse with plain looks and little family around to guide her. But he had never looked at her with the same compassion as Cisco. In fact, Louis had seldom looked at her at all. Still, her father urged her to accept Louis’s marriage proposal, and so she had.

  Cisco touched her arm. “If this is too painful…”

  She shook her head and slid her arm out from under his hand. His touch made her feel…a connection. But she didn’t want to feel anything. Oh, she didn’t mind experiencing the searing heat between them. That at least was something she could push aside when necessary. Real feelings made her weak. And she wouldn’t allow them.

  In lieu of dwelling on feelings—on him—she took another spoonful of stew and began to answer his question. “Louis—that was his name—was a respectable man. At first he was kind to me. I thought our life together was destined to be long and happy, full of family and contentment.”

  “Did you love each other?” Cisco interjected.

  The question was not one she’d spent time on before. “To tell you the truth, I think he did love me, in his way.”

  But then again, at the end, Louis Singleton hadn’t been aware of love or friendship or any other human emotion. His humanity had been lost.

  “And you? How did you feel about him?”

  “Um, well it wasn’t the kind of romantic love you hear about all the time on T.V. But I was happy to be with him. He seemed to offer the long-term friendship and caring that I’d lost when my mother died and my brothers left home. He was a replacement family—and exactly what I thought I wanted at the time.”

  Taking a second to think what to say next, Sunnie ate another bite of stew and followed it with the rest of the corn tortilla. “Besides, he was full of exuberance and passion for new thoughts and ideas. That made him different than any other Navajo I had ever known. It made him fascinating.”

  “What kind of new ideas? What was he into?”

  “Well, that’s just it. I didn’t know, didn’t realize for months, that this exciting secret society he belonged to was the Skinwalker cult.”

  Cisco narrowed his gaze. “How could you not know?”

  A new lump of anger threatened
to well up in her throat. But she attempted to swallow it by finishing off the stew.

  “It wasn’t like any of them came right out and said, ‘Hey, come on down and sign up to get your evil witchcraft with us.’ I don’t think even Louis understood what he was getting into until it was too late.”

  The memory of her guilt, of what she’d done in the name of finding happiness, made her stomach queasy, and she dropped her spoon. “Their philosophy sounded so modern and right. It was the only time I’d ever heard anyone say you wouldn’t find true happiness until you loved yourself first. The idea still makes a kind of sense, even though now I see how anti-Navajo a sentiment like that is. It’s the reverse of everything we’re taught.”

  “How far into the witchcraft did you go?”

  “Not far,” she said and let the annoyance show in her voice. “Mostly I only did what Louis asked me to do. He used me…” She stopped herself, took a breath and went on. “I let him use me to obtain information from the Brotherhood. I spied for him and gave others false information, hoping to lead them in wild directions off his trail.”

  “What happened? How did you get away from him?” Cisco’s voice had become deep and rich with a hint of a Latin accent and more than a hint of caring.

  Sunnie stared into his fathomless gray eyes, found emotion there she didn’t recognize. The heat of it flowed over her skin and seeped into her spirit. This was an odd, new feeling. But one that gave her more strength.

  “The Brotherhood found out about Louis when they were involved in a battle with the Skinwalkers. When Louis was killed, the Brotherhood came to me for answers about him—about me. But most of the men of the Brotherhood are distant cousins and they insisted on helping me find my lost spirit.”

  “How’d they do that?”

  “They have special ceremonies and medicines they’ve designed using ancient texts. They know how to sing chants to form invisible shields around places so that the Skinwalkers can’t get through. They had me go through retraining in Navajo traditions. It took weeks, but I was finally cured.”