by Elsa Jade
He had to do something to make it right again. But could he become a destroyer again when he thought he’d burned away that part of himself in a long-forgotten fireball?
Chapter 2
Chien Lun-mei was up to her shoulder in heaving mare uterus when her radio squelched.
“Want I should answer that for ya, Doc May?” The old rancher who’d called her out—being cheap and waiting until the mare was in more distress than necessary, of course—leaned around the horse’s big backside. “Since you look to got your hands full.”
“If you wouldn’t mind.” Puffing a lock of black hair out of her eyes, she smiled at him with too much teeth. She wasn’t sure what annoyed her more: the midnight emergency call, the mangling of her name, or the fact that her very expensive cell phone had proved useless in this part of Montana, just like everyone had warned her.
But how could there not be cell towers? Between the jagged mountains and utterly flat plains, shouldn’t a call or a text or an Instagram of danzai noodles with perfect shrimp from her favorite Bay Area noodle cart have nowhere else to go?
Kind of like her.
Farmer Fudd (not his real name, but apparently they weren’t doing real names) toggled the radio. “Diamond Valley Veterinary Service. You’ve reached Doc May’s radio. Business hours are all the time.” He chortled aloud at his own cleverness. “How may I help you?”
“Hey there, Dan. It’s Graham. How’s Miss Jakey doing?”
Farmer Fudd peered toward the front of the horse, as if there might be an answer up there. “I guess maybe you were on to something about her liking a lady doctor, seein’s how you couldn’t make it. She calmed right down.”
Lun-mei assumed “she” meant Miss Jakey.
“Good, good,” Graham said. “Ah, is Doctor Chien around?”
“Right here,” she called, careful to keep the strain out of her voice even though the strain in her arm was killing her. Almost as bad as the strain in her calves as she balanced precariously on a mounting block to reach the mare. She’d known large animal medicine was going to be, well, large, but this was ridiculous. “What’s up?” Besides her arm up this poor horse…
“Just got a call from out your way, at the Fallen A Ranch. Hoping you can stop by before you head back into town.”
“Might be awhile.” She closed her eyes as Miss Jakey squeezed. “But maybe not. How urgent?”
“Not sure. Only heard a bit before the signal cut out.” He rattled off an address. “Swing by, will you?”
Of course, the one cell phone to reach through all of Carbon County was a call that kept her out in the boonies and Graham comfy in his bed. “Will do, Doctor Green.” She nodded to Dan to switch off the radio.
To her surprise, the old man gave the radio a disapproving frown. “C’mon now, Green. You know she ought not go out there alone.”
She wanted to bristle—she’d go anywhere for this job—but it was hard to bristle when her hair was slicked to her skin with sweat. Except for that one lock in her eyes, naturally. But really, she had her arm shoved up a sixteen-hand draft horse who outweighed her by an order of magnitude. What could be worse?
“I got this,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Nobody dare get those Halley boys,” Dan muttered.
“No, I mean I got the rest of the placenta.” She carefully withdrew the blood-streaked tissue and received a faceful of clubbed tail for her reward.
In the flurry of checking the slippery mass against the delivered portion she’d already splayed out on the concrete floor of the stable to make sure she’d found every scrap, she forgot the rancher’s strange comment. By the time she’d washed up in the icy-cold stable water, checked the mare one last time and given instructions on watching for the first inkling of infection, then taken a minute to fondle the leggy colt who’d delivered himself with no help from her earlier in the day, she’d almost forgotten her promise to Graham too.
But he was her boss, and she needed to make a good impression, so when Dan walked her to her truck, she didn’t ask why the Halley boys were such trouble. If someone had animals and needed a veterinarian, she’d found she was welcomed everywhere in the end—no matter what her name was or how big she was or if she had boobs instead of a dick.
It was past two a.m. by the time she’d bumped down the distant gravel road. And she’d thought Farmer Fudd was off the beaten path… Only Graham’s three-ring binder of meticulously notated paper maps got her where she was going, and she breathed out a sigh of relief when the sweep of her headlights finally found the stylized wrought iron A—the spurs on the lower serif of the letter descending into narrow wings. The brand matched the notation in the binder: This was the Fallen A Ranch.
She followed the weathered split rail fence that marked the house boundaries of so many ranches toward the house itself. When she reached the yard, she sat a moment, the engine still running, and blinked in surprise at the rambling structure, like a log cabin on performance-enhancing drugs.
Many older homes got built out or upgraded as generations added on, but this house had expanded out and up and over in odd geometrics that made her tilt her head in confusion. She didn’t know much about architecture, but her biology classes had taught how the pressures of evolution often solved survival quandaries in similar, if specialized ways. This place…was different from any other ranch she’d ever visited.
Spires, columns, curved beams, all made of native timber so it seemed normal. But clearly wasn’t. No wonder Farmer Fudd had disapproved on principle.
As her gaze slipped back down from the higher reaches she could barely see in the headlights, a dark figure stepped into the glare.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t the weird house that bothered the old rancher…
The figure was huge, hulking—probably could’ve bench pressed the Belgian mare and shaken the leftover placenta out of her. Though the silhouette of him looked like a rancher—from cowboy hat above to low-heeled cowboy boots below, separated by a black Carhartt coat with the collar turned up against the cold and straight-legged Levi’s with requisite giant belt buckle in the middle—like the house, it just wasn’t quite right.
Lun-mei swallowed hard, the cold coffee she’d gulped on the ride over churning in her belly. Nobody serial-killed veterinarians, she reminded herself. There weren’t enough vets out here to make it a worthwhile sport. Also, the killer would have to leave his name and address with the office, so that’d be dumb.
Almost as dumb as driving out to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
She turned off the truck and got out, glad the headlights stayed on for a minute. The October wind snaked past her, and it took all the strength she had left—what hadn’t been squeezed out by Miss Jakey’s post-birth contractions—not to wrap her arms around herself. “Mr. Halley?”
He didn’t leave his spot. “Where’s Doc Green?”
Oh, well hell. For all his unusual size, turned out he was just like every other old rancher who saw a woman vet. “Dreaming sweet dreams. Unlike you and me. Care to tell me what the problem is?”
Though the angle of his hat shielded his eyes from the glare of her headlights, she could see the clench of his heavy jaw. Gigantism, maybe, with acromegaly? Something had distorted his proportions. The unkind xenon glow picked out an intermittent silvery sheen on his exposed skin. Scars? Treatment for gigantism usually focused on the pituitary gland, deep in the brain, not topical at all.
But she wasn’t that kind of “real” doctor, she reminded herself acidly.
“The problem,” he growled in answer to her question. “I wasn’t expecting a female.”
Oh well double hell. She’d been reduced from woman to female. Next would come “little lady”. How she yearned to get back in her truck and drive away, leave this Cro-Magnon grunting Hulk wannabe in her dust. But then Graham would have to come out in the morning and he’d wonder if he made the right call in her. Worse yet, her as-yet-unknown patient would suffer, maybe die.
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She took a steadying breath. “And I wasn’t expecting to justify my existence to someone who said he needed help at”—she checked her watch—“two-thirty in the a.m. Yet here we are.”
Her headlights decided they’d had enough too and turned themselves off.
She suddenly felt much colder and more alone, although the indirect glow from the yard light near the barn assured her she wasn’t actually alone.
As if that were better.
After another moment, silent except for the restless hiss of wind, the big rancher took a step to one side. “This way.”
Growing up in San Francisco watching cowboy movies, she’d thought the men of the West were all romantically laconic. Working in large animal veterinary services, she’d discovered ranchers actually loved to talk; spending all their time with four-leggers left them with a conversation deficit. Now, she finally encountered one of those mythical strong, silent types—and she wanted to poke him just so he’d make noise.
Instead, she made him wait, shifting impatiently from boot to boot, while she pulled out her med supply bag. If he didn’t want to tell her what she was getting into, she’d bring it all.
Including the pepper spray she surreptitiously pocketed on her right.
Flashlight in her left hand, she walked over to him.
God, he was so tall. He had to be over twenty hands—er, close to seven foot. And wide. About three of her. His hands were shoved in his pockets now, so she couldn’t get a closer look at the scarring, and she didn’t want to shine her flashlight right in his face, though she was curious.
Professionally only, of course.
“I’m Doctor Chien Lun-mei,” she said, deciding to try starting over. Going on three a.m. seemed like as good a time as any for a do-over. “Can you tell me what’s the problem?”
“Doctor Chien Lun-mei,” he repeated. To her shock, his intonation was perfect, without even a hint of hesitation. “Mock.” He pivoted on his heel and headed toward the barn.
He was mocking her? How rude. She probably still had horse blood under her nails to dilute the evidence if she attacked him—
“Mach Halley,” he continued from a few steps ahead of her.
She heard the distinction this time. Not mock or Mac, but somewhere in between. She wondered if it was short for something. Ha. He wasn’t short in any way.
Certainly the length of his stride was mocking her, intentionally or not. She had to scuttle to keep up, and the soles of her paddock boots—she’d bought them one size too big to fit extra thick socks in winter—thumped behind him like an anxious rabbit on the packed earth.
“Mr. Halley—”
“Mach.”
She shifted her jaw from one side to the other to stop herself from snapping at him. “Tell me about the patient.”
“In here.”
That…wasn’t really helpful. But she followed him into the barn. Though it wasn’t warmer inside—the faded aromas announced that no creatures were present to lend their body heat—just cutting the wind made a difference. God, she’d kill for an espresso. The expectation of meeting a new client (not Mach Halley but the animal) kept the sleepiness at bay, but the heat would’ve been much welcomed.
She glanced around the pole barn. Like the house, the bones looked old, the main timbers weathered gray, built when lumber was cheap and old growth. The slanting aluminum siding wings to both sides, obviously added later, doubled the square footage, but the big space was empty. Probably it was used mostly as a staging area for livestock in season. “Where…?”
Then, as they came around the steel bars of a feed rack, she saw the egg.
It wasn’t as big as the man who’d stopped abruptly at the sound of her gasp—but pretty damn close enough. And she had gasped. Slightly less ovoid than a chicken egg, the speckled off-white shell was propped with its thick end in the sandy substrate. Though the only illumination came from her flashlight and a bare bulb in the tack room off to one side, the egg almost glowed in the murky shadows.
“What…?” Her stumbling one-word questions were not going to inspire much confidence in her abilities. But really… “What is that?”
He was going to say it was a poorly wrapped hay bale. Or a joke. Or maybe an art installation. Who would’ve guessed this Carbon County rancher had an eye for inexplicable modern art?
“That’s your patient.”
She sidelonged a disbelieving glance at him. “What. Is. That?” Her tone rose with each word.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s…an ostrich egg.”
She laughed aloud. Normally she tried not to yell at tightfisted or inattentive animal owners, nor laugh at needlessly worried ones. But if he was going to mess with her, she reserved the right to mock him back. Mach him. “That is not an ostrich egg.”
He crossed his arms the other direction, hunching his shoulders—an uncomfortable stance balanced awkwardly between rueful and menacing. “So you’ve seen a lot of ostrich eggs around here?”
She sputtered. “Well, no… But I’ve been to an emu farm. Anyway, I know how big an ostrich egg is.” She gestured in a rough football shape—sending the beam of her flashlight dancing over the…not-ostrich egg. “That is bigger than a dakotaraptor egg.”
He studied the egg as if it baffled him too. “I don’t know dakotaraptors.”
Sputtering again, she turned back the way she’d come.
“Where are you going?” Somehow, in two long strides, he was right in front of her, blocking the way.
“It’s late,” she said with great dignity. “I’m tired. If you want to play a Halloween trick-or-treat on someone, next time you might want to choose someone who isn’t going to charge you after-hours fees.”
He faced her squarely but gave her the same wary look as he’d given the egg. “I don’t know Halloween either.”
She didn’t care if it was rude; she shone her flashlight right in his face. “Look, Mr. Halley—”
“Mach.” He took a half step toward her, into the light. “I’m not tricking you.”
She stared at him, not really hearing him. Despite the heaviness of his features, there was a rough magnificence to him, like the Beartooth Mountains to the west, their valleys and crevasses limned in silvery snow like his scars. And his eyes… In her flashlight glow, the seemingly dark brown flashed with the same silver shine. Cataracts? He seemed to see her well enough. She knew staring was rude, but she’d never seen anything like the egg or him.
With one more narrowed glare, she swung the light from him back to the egg. “I’ll ask you once more and you can answer plainly or I’m walking out of here and getting coffee. What is it?”
When he hesitated, she rolled up to the toes of her boots, and he hastily said, “A rare species of…elephant bird.”
She pursed her lips, struggling to remember her natural history. “Elephant birds are extinct.”
“I didn’t think the egg was viable either,” he said. “But it’s dying. And…I want you to save it.”
His deep voice wavered, strung too tight with some emotion, and for maybe the first time since she’d stepped out of her truck, she thought he was being straight with her. “Do you have a permit to keep exotics?”
His lips twisted, making the silver in his skin shimmer like raindrops. “I didn’t know I’d need one.”
She gave him a curt nod. “You need to do that. But I’ll see what I can do in the meantime.” A spurt of excitement erased any tiredness, real or threatened. It was impossible that this was an elephant bird—she’d have to check her reference materials but she was almost sure the massive flightless birds had died out from overhunting by ancient man—but whatever it was (how big were komodo eggs?) no egg wanted to be kept like this.
She approached the nacreous shell. It was actually a little smaller than she’d thought, just up to her sternum. The big, empty space around it—not to mention her shock—had made it seem enormous. Yeah, it was still crazy big, but like Mach, maybe she was getting u
sed to them both.
Taking a breath, she laid her bare hand on the speckled curve. It was cooler than her pocket, but not as chilly as the air. This close, a web of silver threads was barely visible within the calcite layers. Frowning, she played the beam of the flashlight at an angle across the shell. The threads weren’t a web, exactly, or not the gradual curves and random angles of nature. These were strictly parallel and perpendicular lines, more like a computer chip—
“What do you think, Doctor Chien Lun-mei?”
“Doctor May is fine,” she said absently. Something about the way he said her name, so smoothly, like he knew more than he was sharing, bothered her. “Where did you get this? How long have you had it? What conditions has it been kept in until now?”
He blinked at her rapid-fire questions. “It’s been in…cold storage. For awhile. I inherited it.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry. I don’t know that any egg can remain viable if it’s not kept at the right temperature and humidity.”
“It’s still alive.” He put his hand next to hers. “Listen.”
Still frowning at him, she edged away to retrieve the stethoscope from her bag. Leaning over the egg, she pressed the diaphragm to the shell.
The calcite rippled under her fingers. Barely perceptible but she gasped again. “What…?”
“That metal,” he said. “It’s cold.” When she blinked at him, he took the bell of the scope delicately in his big fingers and rubbed the disk in the cupped palm of his hand.
The friction should’ve been too loud in her ears, but she couldn’t hear anything over her pounding heartbeat. He was standing too close, the scope tubing connecting them like a leash. A hitch of her breath carried the scent of him deep into her lungs. The usual ranch smells of diesel, stone, and pine almost—but not quite—disguised something stranger, like the ozone after lightning.
Her breath stuttered out, and she realized she’d been holding it. “That’s…warm enough,” she said, cursing the wobble in her words.
