Tears of the Shaman

by Rebecca Daniels

  It wasn’t until Graywolf came to an abrupt halt at a gravelly clearing that Mallory realized just how hard she’d been concentrating. She turned, surprised to see just how far up from the canyon floor they had climbed. The sun had begun to sink into the horizon, and the long shadows streaked out across the desert. Far below she could just make out the outline of the Jeep, parked at the base of the mountain. It looked so tiny and insignificant against the vast panorama.

  “It’s so beautiful,” Mallory murmured, gazing out across the landscape.

  Graywolf glanced back. The pale, muted hues from the setting sun gave her skin a soft, rosy glow. It was all he could do to stop himself from reaching out, from touching her and pulling her to him.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, dismissing the breathtaking panorama with a tight voice. “We’ll make camp here for the night.”

  Mallory gave her head a little shake, forcing her attention away from the incredible sight. “What would you like me to do?”

  “It’ll be cold tonight. We’ll need wood for a fire,” he said, slipping off his pack and helping her off with hers. “You could look for some.”

  “Okay,” Mallory said good-naturedly, rubbing her shoulders where the straps had pressed. She surveyed the area for a moment, then headed for a spot up the trail where a tree limb had fallen.

  “Watch your step,” Graywolf said testily.

  “I know, I know,” she said, turning back and giving him a deliberate look. “The last thing you need...” She let her words drift off as she turned and started back up the trail.

  Graywolf watched for a moment, then turned and began unloading the packs. In a million years he would never be able to figure the woman out. She was the very picture of the fragile, frail white woman with her delicate hands and fair skin. He wouldn’t have thought she’d last ten minutes climbing up the steep trail with the afternoon sun beating down on them and the heavy pack strapped to her back. He’d purposely kept their pace brisk, purposely pushed hard, expecting any moment that she would capitulate, admit the task was too much for her and return to the Jeep where she belonged.

  He gathered up a number of rocks, fashioning them into a circle to form a fire ring. He’d hoped after a few good hours of climbing she would be crying to return to the Jeep and drive back to Rawley’s and wait for him there. But instead, there had been no complaint from her, no plea for rest or consideration—not even so much as a hint of protest or dissent. To his never-ending surprise, she’d kept pace, kept quiet and kept out of his way. The woman was an enigma.

  “This enough?”

  He turned around, surprised to see her standing there with a huge armload of firewood. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders, and the color in her cheeks was rich and alive. She looked as fresh and as energetic as when they’d started up the mountain, and he found himself cursing inwardly again.

  “For starters,” he grumbled, reaching for one of the packs.

  Mallory rolled her eyes, bending down and depositing the wood near the ring he’d formed with the rocks. “I can get some more if you like.”

  “Later,” he muttered, pulling his bedroll from the pack. “You realize there will be no tent tonight. You going to be okay with that?”

  She gave him a sidelong glance. “Careful medicine man, or I might start to think you are actually concerned about my comfort.”

  “I just don’t want you panicking in the darkness, that’s all.” Graywolf shrugged, unrolled the sleeping bag and positioned it near the fire ring. “Women do that sometimes.”

  “I don’t panic in the darkness,” she pointed out dryly, wondering just who these women were that he’d had out in the darkness. “Besides, my sister and I used to sleep out under the stars all the time when we were young.” She began to stack the wood in the ring, starting with a handful of small, dry twigs and constructing a shelter of larger twigs atop them. “And for your information, I was also a Girl Scout. I camped out a lot as a kid and know how to cook over an open fire.” She reached into her pocket and brought out a small book of matches. Striking one, she lit the dry brush and slowly coaxed the fire to start, first adding twigs, and then larger pieces of wood. “So don’t be thinking you Indians have the market cornered on wilderness survival.”

  “Navajo.”

  She turned, still smiling, and looked up at him. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m Navajo.”

  “Yes, you are, aren’t you,” she said with a saccharine smile. She knew he was annoyed with her, but that only made her want to smile more. She could get his goat, and she hadn’t enjoyed anything so much since she was eleven years old and she and Marissa did battle with their obnoxious cousin Gregory. If Benjamin Graywolf found her irritating, it was small recompense for all the hard times he’d given her.

  Just then a cool gust of wind blew down the mountain, stirring up dust and whipping wildly at the flames in the fire ring. Graywolf drew in a deep breath, swallowing his frustration and reminding himself that nothing about this white woman was of any importance to him. He glanced up the mountain ridge to the spot where Mallory had gathered the wood, and then back to where she sat working the fire. If she wanted to play at being the perky Girl Scout, he might as well give her something to sink her teeth into.

  “Since we’ll probably want to keep a fire burning most of the night, I think I’ll go find some more wood to burn,” he announced as he turned and started up the trail toward the fallen limb. After a few steps, he stopped and turned back around. “And since you’re such a whiz with the wilderness skills, you can stay up tonight and tend it.”

  The smile slowly disappeared from Mallory’s face. She should have known better than to try to have the last word with him. The man was too stubborn, too pigheaded, to let anyone get the better of him—especially her.

  The darkness seemed to fall like a blanket, and with it came the cold. Mallory ate her meager dinner ration of beef jerky and crackers, and began to think staying up to tend the burning fire wasn’t going to be very difficult, after all. It was obvious that Graywolf hadn’t seriously meant for her to remain up the entire night, but the wind was bitter cold, and it seemed as though the mountain had come alive with strange sounds and dark shadows. The way she felt, she was certain she would never be able to fall asleep, anyway.

  Mallory didn’t remember feeling sleepy, she had no recollection of becoming groggy. Nor could she remember her eyelids growing heavy or her head lolling back against the rock she leaned against. That was why when Graywolf grabbed her by the shoulders and began to shake her violently, she was utterly confused and disoriented.

  “W-what?” she stammered, fighting against his hold and blinking her eyes wildly. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “A child,” Graywolf said quietly, holding her by the shoulders and staring down into her dazed, sleep-heavy eyes. “Tell me about your sister and the child.”

  Chapter 9

  “Child?” Mallory mumbled, struggling to make sense of what he was asking. “What child? You mean Josh?”

  “Josh is her child?” Graywolf asked, releasing his hold on her shoulders. “Her baby.”

  “Yes,” she nodded, slipping the sleeping bag down to free her arms. “But Josh isn’t a baby. He’s a teenager, almost fifteen.”

  “No,” he mumbled, sitting back and staring into the fire. “No, it’s not him.”

  “What’s not?” Mallory insisted. “What are you talking about? Graywolf, what’s all this about?”

  “I dreamed,” he murmured, closing his eyes and rubbing at his temples. “Your sister and a child.”

  “Well...” Mallory paused, absently scratching her head, struggling to push aside the last remnants of sleepiness. “She’s...she’s a teacher,” she pointed out excitedly. “Maybe one of her students?”

  Graywolf shook his head. “No, this child is an infant, a newborn.” He opened his eyes and turned to her. “This is a child she loves. A Navajo child.”

  Mallory sank back against the ha
rd rock. “A Navajo child? I don’t understand.”

  Graywolf stared at her for a moment, thinking of the vision, of the small child in the arms of the biligaana woman. Its shock of black hair and flat, wide face was unmistakably Navajo, and yet the woman who held it so gently, weeping tears of joy, was the pale-haired biligaana he had dreamed about for weeks—like Mallory, and yet not like her at all.

  Marissa, her sister. He understood that now. The woman who had filled his visions, the woman he’d been seeing in his head for so long, was Marissa Wakefield. But what did this last vision mean? What were the images and the feelings trying to tell him? They had been so clear—focused and in great detail. Like frames on a reel of film replaying over and over again the same, brief scene. He could see the small tear on Marissa’s long-sleeved shirt, the smut of mud on the cuff—dry red clay like the mud her car had sunk into. She stood before a fire, he could see the light of the flames reflecting golden off her hair. The baby cried—the feisty, spirited wail of a newborn shouting its entrance into the world.

  Was this the reason she had disappeared? Was it a child that had brought her into the wilderness, that had brought her to a mountaintop through heat, rain and flood?

  “Is there a chance your sister...” Graywolf ran a hand through his long black hair, knowing the question was an obvious one. “Could your sister be...pregnant?”

  “What?” Mallory gasped, sitting upright. “Pregnant? No, that’s crazy. Marissa couldn’t be pregnant.”

  Mallory’s utter rejection of the notion had Graywolf’s eyes darkening suspiciously. “Why?” he snorted. “Because she’s unable to bear a child, or because it’s a Navajo child?”

  “No,” Mallory said deliberately, glaring up at him. The bitterness and hostility in his voice had been like a hot knife in the heart, showing her once again just how little he thought of her, how little trust he had. “Not because of that. Because she’s my sister, and because I’d know if she was going to have a baby.”

  “How would you know?” he demanded. “How can you be so sure? You said yourself you hadn’t seen your sister in over a year. A lot could have happened in that time.”

  Mallory reached for the zipper on the sleeping bag and angrily yanked it open. “Why would Marissa want to keep something like that from me? Me—her own sister.”

  Graywolf shrugged. “Shame. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman was ashamed to bear the child of an Indian.”

  Mallory hated it when he tried purposely to be insolent and rude. She tossed off the bedroll and rose to her feet. Her chest heaved up and down rapidly, betraying the anger and the emotion she felt. “That’s just plain stupid,” she scoffed. “Marissa and I share everything—I thought you understood that.”

  “Everything?” he asked skeptically, rising slowly to stand in front of her. “Would your sister have told you if she had an Indian lover? Would she have been eager to tell you that she’d slept with a savage, that the child in her belly was a half-breed?”

  Mallory had never been a violent person, had never struck anyone before—not even Randy when he’d lashed out at her during his mindless, drunken rages. So when the palm of her hand made a sudden stinging contact with the hard surface of Graywolf’s cheek, she was as shocked and surprised as he.

  It was reflex that had Graywolf reaching out, that had him grabbing her wrist roughly and yanking her to him. Her eyes looked like blue ice, glaring up at him, and he felt their bitter cold all the way to his soul. What was he doing? What kind of power did she have over him? He couldn’t even think straight when he was around her, couldn’t make sense out of anything he felt or said. Slowly, he released his hold on her wrist and dropped his hand to his side.

  “How dare you speak to me like that?” Mallory rasped in a hoarse, ragged voice, rubbing at the raw, red streaks his hand had left on her arm. “How dare you make those kinds of judgments?”

  He dropped his gaze, not wanting to talk, not even wanting to look at her. “Okay, forget it.”

  “If you’ve had a vision of Marissa and a child,” she went on, “a Navajo child—then it has to mean something else. Don’t you think I’d know if my sister was pregnant, or had a child? Don’t you think I’d know?“

  “Okay,” he shouted out defensively. He just wanted to drop it—wanted to forget all the anger, forget all the stupid things he’d said, forget how icy and harsh her eyes had been and how stony cold they’d made him feel. “Just...forget it.”

  She turned, stomping over the discarded bedroll and reaching for a large log from the pile of wood they’d gathered. “You of all people should understand that. You of all peo—”

  “Look,” he shouted, cutting her off. He drew in a deep breath. “Look,” he said again, in a calmer, quieter voice. “It was a stupid thing to say, I admit it. I’m...” He stopped and ran a hand through his hair again. “I’m...sorry.”

  Mallory dropped the log on the fire, rubbing her palms together to clean off her hands. “I’m sorry, too, about...well, you know, about the slap.”

  Graywolf touched the spot on his cheek where it still stung. Susan had tried to slap him once, when he’d confronted her about the news story that had broken in the front page of a tabloid. But she’d been too slow, too uncertain, and he’d caught her hand before it had time to make contact.

  There had been nothing slow, nothing uncertain, in Mallory Wakefield’s response. She’d taken him completely by surprise. She’d struck out viscerally and automatically, in defense of her sister, and he suspected she’d do the same for anyone she loved.

  “Forget it,” he mumbled, absently rubbing his cheek.

  “It’s just that if you knew Marissa,” she said, her throat feeling tight, “if you knew the kind of person she is, how much kindness there is in her, how much love... It would be impossible for her to feel ashamed or embarrassed about anyone she loved—especially a child, and especially her own child.”

  “Okay,” Graywolf said with a sigh. “If the child is not hers, whose could it be?”

  Mallory shook her head. “I have no idea. What else did you see?”

  Graywolf sat back down on his bedroll before the fire and told her everything about the vision. He described in detail the scene that had played in his head—of Marissa holding the newborn Navajo infant, of her torn shirt, dirty face, and the swell of love in her heart. They kicked around a few ideas, tossed out a number of possibilities, and tried to figure out just how it could help them in their search.

  Of course, what he didn’t share with her was the dream—the real, honest-to-God dream, the just-like-everyone-else-gets kind of dream, the dream the vision had interrupted, the dream he’d had about her. In it she had been back at the stream, standing beneath the flow of water, her bare skin wet and smooth. Only this time, he had stood in the water with her, his hands moving over her wet flesh, exploring and seeking. In the dream there had been no taboos or inhibitions, no doubt or suspicion. It had just been the two of them—alone, with only a desperate hunger for each other. He had pulled her to him, had drawn that slender body of hers next to his. She had sighed his name, had whispered sweet, seductive pleas into his ear. His body had grown hard, desire had pounded at him, making him feel hotter than the flames of the fire. He could feel the wet coolness of her skin, could taste the sweetness of the water on her lips, could feel the pressure of her legs as they wrapped around him.

  Graywolf closed his eyes, remembering the dream and fighting off an almost overwhelming feeling of longing. He could understand how his ancestors believed in the mystic powers of the white woman. This one had certainly cast a spell on him. There was no escape from her, no place to run and hide. She was everywhere he looked, every place he went. He was forced to endure her presence during the long hot hours of the day, only to be haunted by her image in his dreams at night.

  He opened his eyes, giving his head a shake in an effort to dispel the power of the incantation. It was more important than ever that they find her sister as soon as possible.
He wanted Mallory Wakefield and her haunting sea blue eyes out of his world, and out of his life forever. He would tell her everything about the vision, anything she would ever want to know, anything that might help lead them to her sister. But the dream...the dream belonged to him. He would bear its torture alone.

  “These visions,” Mallory was asking as she sank back down onto her sleeping bag and pulled it up around her shoulders. “I’m confused. Are they usually images of things that are happening right now—like in the present? Or are they more like premonitions?”

  “Is this off the record?”

  Mallory gave him a dirty look. “I thought we’d worked all that out a long time ago?”

  Graywolf took a deep breath. Normally he didn’t like talking about his...abilities, but for some reason it was easy talking to her—maybe a little too easy. It might be because Mallory Wakefield had her own special “talents” that made her less judgmental and more accepting, or because she was a good reporter and asked the right questions and knew how to listen. He knew he just had to be careful around her—it would be too easy to say too much, reveal more than he intended, and then he’d be left to pay the consequences.

  “Generally they’re more like precognition,” he said cautiously. “Just a short time in the future. But then, like when I was in your sister’s car, I can sometimes pick up...impressions of things that have happened there—feelings, emotions—things like that.”

  “And add to that a few hunches and some deductive reasoning...” Mallory added, purposely letting her words drift.

  “And if the truth be known, there’s really more of that than the hocus-pocus stuff,” Graywolf admitted, giving her a deliberate look. “But that doesn’t make for as good a copy.”

  Mallory regarded him carefully over the flames of the fire. “Is the reason you don’t trust me because I’m a reporter, because I’m a woman or because I’m white?”