Night of the Panther

by Suzanne Forster

  He could see her limping and knew she must be in considerable pain. His own muscles were as tender as bruises from yesterday’s climb. Hers must have been torn apart by it. He’d seen the cuts on her arms and legs, but it was also clear that she wasn’t in any mood to accept aid and comfort.

  She stumbled and caught herself, swearing so loudly even he could hear it. He decided to hang back and give her plenty of room. There was nothing to be gained in crowding an angry woman. But he smiled when she faltered again, then picked up a loose rock and flung it out of her way. The amusement he felt had an odd quality of sympathy to it, sympathy that for once wasn’t driven by guilt or tainted with anger.

  His ancestors would have called it softening toward the enemy, he realized. And there was no greater shame for an Apache warrior. A man’s honor, his very life, depended on his ability to deal swiftly and mercilessly with anyone who threatened his survival, or the survival of his tribe. It was a violent code for a violent existence.

  She did qualify as a threat, he reminded himself, watching her disappear down the trail. He’d been emotionally mugged by that sweet thing in blue chintz and braided hair. She had ripped his heart out when he’d been young and stupid, and if he hadn’t learned anything from that experience, then he deserved whatever he got.

  Still, he though, watching her yellow hair swing in the sunlight, she was changing, transforming before his very eyes into a female even more irresistible than the one he remembered. Fortunately she was angrier than hell at the moment and wouldn’t let him near her. If he thought he’d done her a favor by backing off in the cave, he knew with the utmost certainty that she was doing him a favor by being furious with him now.

  He drew a deep breath and started down the mountain after her. They were about to spend several more days together alone in these mountains. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if they both let their guard down at once.

  “The moon! Look, there’s a ring around it,” Honor said, pointing up at the night sky. A silvery nimbus surrounded a moon so full it seemed about to give birth.

  Johnny twisted to look up where Honor was pointing. The campfire they sat at had burned down low, making it easy to see even the tiniest stars sparkling above them.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, turning back to Johnny’s mysterious smile. “And very mystical,” she added. “Does it mean something?”

  He just shrugged, which piqued her curiosity.

  After the climb that morning, and out of necessity, they’d spent most of the rest of the day gathering food. It had been a tense but bearable experience once she’d decided it was pointless being angry at someone as unpredictable as Johnny. Tonight, after a meal of roasted rabbit, mescal, and acorns, they’d both relaxed a little.

  “Is that a smile?” she persisted, searching his darkly handsome face. “What’s going on? Does it mean something spooky? Like zombies rising from their graves?”

  “Not even close. I don’t know if there’s any official meaning, but when I was a kid and the moon got like that, I used to hear the women whispering about ‘love magic.’”

  “What’s love magic?”

  “Remember, you asked.”

  She laughed. “I’m holding my breath here.”

  “It’s a spell used to attract lovers. In its strongest form, godistso nca, it creates an uncontrollable obsession to be with the one who cast the spell.”

  “Sounds romantic.”

  He sat forward, long hair flowing around him as he regarded the fire. “That depends on your point of view,” he said finally, looking up at her. “The obsession is sexual. The object of the spell becomes a love slave.”

  “Love slave?” Honor fingered the long rip in the neckline of her blouse. The tears in her blouse and skirt had happened yesterday on her trip up the mountain, but now she felt as if her clothes were falling off. “And how do you—I mean, how does one cast such a spell?”

  He shrugged again, his smile faintly wicked. The fire painted the bronzed angles of his face with liquid gold. “I never got into sorcery.”

  Her whistle of relief seemed to intrigue him, and she found herself wishing she could look away from the golden flames reflected in his eyes. He didn’t need sorcery. All he had to do was catch a woman in his gaze, in the luminous glare of his panther eyes, and she was helplessly ensnared—his quivering prey, his love slave, or whatever his mercurial mood dictated.

  Almost involuntarily Honor glanced over at the lean-to, his “bedroom” out-of-doors. Was she going to be sleeping in there with him? That didn’t seem a wise idea given their track record.

  “We’ll do it back-to-back,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Sleep. Tonight. Back-to-back shouldn’t get us in too much trouble.”

  “As long as we stay that way.”

  Her words were prophetic. They fell asleep back-to-back, but woke up face-to-face, her leg thrown over his hip, the back of her hand pressed into his pelvis.

  “Do you think you could find another place for that?” he asked, indicating her hand.

  He was surprisingly polite, considering everything.

  “It must have been the moon,” Honor explained.

  That day he showed her how the Apache hunted waterfowl without weapons. He floated gourds in a pond full of ducks until the ducks accepted the objects drifting among them. Then he made himself a gourd mask and entered the pool, submerging until only the gourd showed. Within seconds he was close enough to a duck to touch it. He was about to grab its little webbed feet and pull it under when Honor realized what he was going to do and let out a shriek.

  “Don’t drown that duck!” she cried.

  “You would have been one hungry Indian,” Johnny told her as waterfowl scattered far and wide.

  That night they feasted on nuts, seeds, and berries and gazed uneasily at the ringed moon. The next morning it was Johnny who had his hand in the wrong place when they woke up. He was curled behind her, cupping her breast. He released her immediately, but it was too late to do Honor any good. She had already melted like a quart of ice cream left out at a birthday party. His touch enthralled her, showering her with hot jets of pleasure. Her dreams paled in comparison to the real thing. “It was your turn,” she assured him earnestly, hoping to give him a hint.

  Johnny didn’t need hints. He already had the combined sex drive of ten rutting stags. The way she’d caressed him the night before with her white-hot fingertips, it was a miracle all he did was touch her. He wanted to shake her naked body with his deep thrusts. He wanted to feel her clutching at him, to hear her throaty screams of pleasure.

  He’d been aroused for days on end without relief. It wouldn’t have surprised him if this was another part of the test his grandfather had in mind. Warrior training, he thought, smiling grimly. Get a man as hard as a war club and keep him that way day and night. It was guaranteed to put him in a fighting mood.

  But as the days wore on, it was her ability to endure hardship that most challenged his assumptions about her. Strength and bravery weren’t qualities he’d expected from her, but she didn’t shrink from the creatures that howled by night or the grueling excursions to find food during the day. She was generous to a fault, sharing whatever she’d foraged with him, even when there was barely enough for her. She wasn’t acting like the kind of woman who would betray a man lightly, he admitted to himself.

  An uneasy bond formed between them. Johnny told himself it was an alliance against the elements. They had to cooperate to survive. He even found a way to reduce the agony of their sleeping arrangements. He would wait until she was asleep before joining her in the lean-to.

  On this particular night he waited even longer than usual, but Honor was still awake when he entered. She was holding something in her hand when she glanced up and saw him. Quickly she slipped it into the pocket of her dress.

  “What are you doing?” Johnny asked. He’d got a glimpse of what looked like a small blue stone, similar to one
of the charms in his medicine bag.

  “Nothing, really. A good-luck piece I brought with me.”

  Her vague smile made him suspicious. Still, he couldn’t imagine that she would have gone through his medicine bag. “What is it, Honor?”

  “Nothing,” she said, a note of urgency in her voice. “Let it go, okay?”

  Distrust was seeping into his blood, threatening the tentative bond that was developing between them. “Honor, don’t do this,” he said softly. “Talk to me. We have a bargain, remember? You agreed to do whatever I asked.”

  She shook her head and rolled away from him, assuming the position she slept in. “I don’t care what I agreed to,” she said. “It’s late, and I’m tired.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder, and she jerked away from him. “Johnny, don’t!”

  Sensing the depth of her turmoil, he backed off.

  Gradually she turned to face him, and with great reluctance drew the stone from her pocket. Johnny struggled to breathe as he stared at the triangular piece of turquoise, one of the strongest of the Apache medicine charms.

  “You gave it to me,” she said, “a long time ago.”

  “I know.” He had given her the charm before going to trial on the assault-and-battery charges. He’d had no idea then how things would turn out, that she would testify against him. But perhaps he’d had a premonition that he might never see her again.

  She sat up and brought the stone to her mouth, pressing it against the softness of her lower lip, unaware of how penitent the gesture looked. Finally, with great difficulty, she spoke. ‘“No matter what happens, Honor, keep this. Remember me.’”

  She looked up at him, tears sparkling in her eyes. “That’s what you said to me.”

  The pain Johnny felt was so razor-sharp, he had to suck in air to control it. He turned away from her, his eyes unfocused, his mind riveted on the past. He remembered the words, and every ragged breath he’d had to take to find the control to say them.

  “I kept it,” she whispered. “I didn’t forget.”

  “Honor, don’t—” Even her voice stabbed at him. He couldn’t let her resurrect that memory. It was the pocket where all his pain resided. He couldn’t even let her express her anguish about that day, because it touched his own. He would never forget the awkwardness, the naked misery, with which he tried to say “Remember me” and ended up saying good-bye. His sixteen-year-old heart had felt as though it were bursting.

  “Johnny, please . . . ? Can we talk?”

  “No,” he said harshly. In her desperation to make things right, she kept blundering into his wounds. “You said you were tired. Get some sleep.”

  He heard her sink down on the bed of leaves that made up the floor of the lean-to. Rigid with the need to gain control of his emotions, he sat with his back to her. He couldn’t move. He felt as if he’d been opened up and gutted, but left alive. If he thrashed like a mortally wounded animal, if he tried to get away, he might bleed to death.

  It seemed that hours had passed before he finally lay down, his back to hers, bare skin against blue chintz. Rigidly still, he was aware of the movement of her shoulders against his as she breathed. He could feel the place where her lower back sloped away from his and then returned in the yielding warmth of her buttocks. The experience of his own grief had heightened all his senses. He was as exquisitely tuned in to her as if their nervous systems were linked at the places where their spines touched. He could hear the shallow rasp of her breath, and he knew somehow that she was trying not to cry. He could feel her hopelessness, her sadness.

  Honor, he thought, what happened?

  She shifted, and he felt her moving, turning toward him.

  His heart pounding, he waited until she was facing his back. And then he turned too.

  If there was any resistance left in him at all, it was gone the instant he caught a glimpse of her beautiful, tear-streaked face. He dragged her into his arms.

  “Johnny—”

  “Hush,” he said, “hush.” Pain ripped a piece from his heart as he clutched her close. The torment he’d been fighting for so long, for years, poured over the wound like a river of fire. It was the fiercest, sweetest agony he’d ever known. Vaguely aware that he was crushing her in his arms, and that he didn’t want to hurt her, he understood only that he had to survive the assault somehow. He couldn’t let her speak, not even to comfort him. He couldn’t let her do anything that might unleash the horrible wonder of what was happening inside him.

  Finally he released her, and she buried her face in his hair and heaved a trembling sigh. They held each other that way for a long time, enemies of the heart thrown together by some mysterious design, brought to their knees by the truth of their shared humanity.

  “Johnny,” she whispered, “is it all right between us now?”

  He knew what she was asking, and he had so many reasons not to answer her. It was a dangerous question, badly timed. But he was vulnerable now, opened, and he couldn’t resist it. Feelings were flowing that he’d held in check for so long. There were things he didn’t understand. Questions that needed answers.

  He drew back from her, deliberating. Her grave blue eyes and tear-streaked smile broke his heart.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He followed the path of her tears with his forefinger, surprised at his own need to be tender. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to testify?” he asked. “Even if you believed you were doing the right thing, why didn’t you warn me? We were friends, Honor. Friends watch out for each other; they protect each other.”

  “They told me I couldn’t talk to you, Johnny, not once I’d agreed to be a witness for the prosecution. My father said there would be a mistrial—”

  “Your father hated me. How could you have believed anything he said?”

  Tears glittered. “I had to, Johnny. I didn’t know what else to do!”

  He stared down at her, regret flaring through him. Why was he doing this? Why was he putting her to a test he knew she couldn’t pass? The bond he’d felt went beyond friendship. He would have done anything for her, sacrificed his life. And yet she’d been afraid to stand up to her father. God, it destroyed him to think that she hadn’t even found a way to warn him.

  “Johnny, please. I was frightened for you!”

  “Frightened for me? When the prosecutor asked you if I had violent tendencies, you told him yes. When he asked if I’d threatened to kill those boys, you said yes—” He broke off as the pain resurged.

  “But, Johnny, what else could I do? What else could I say? I couldn’t lie on the witness stand.”

  Her desperation was heartbreaking. It tugged at him, but he couldn’t let himself respond. There was too much misery, too much grief. He was already shutting down, he realized, moving away from her emotionally. His heart was growing cold again, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He could almost forgive her the testimony because she’d been tricked. But whether it came out of his Apache heritage or out of the terrible isolation of his childhood, he couldn’t forgive her for not being the friend he’d needed, the friend he would have been to her.

  “I can’t stay here tonight,” he said.

  “Why? Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know—anywhere but here.” He pushed to his feet, brushing the leaves from his legs. His food pouch and knife were by the campfire. As he started to get them, she came out of the lean-to and called his name. He didn’t stop.

  “Johnny, I won’t let you do this to me again! If you go, I’ll—”

  She was shaking with anger. He could hear it in her voice.

  “You’ll what?” he said, turning to her.

  She dragged in a breath, as though preparing to blast him. Instead she shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know . . . just don’t do it.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Don’t go.”

  Johnny breathed a harsh word, but it wasn’t anger burning inside him now; it was sadness. His heart was a fiery hole in his chest as he turned and
walked away from her, into the dark soul of the forest.

  Nine

  HONOR WOKE UP HALF-FROZEN and barely able to uncoil from the ball she’d curled into. Her first awareness was of the warm spot on her back, apparently from a ray of sunshine poking through a hole in the lean-to roof. Her second awareness was that she had spent the night alone. Johnny hadn’t come back, she realized, as she glanced out at the dead ashes of the campfire.

  She quickly gathered kindling and got the fire going again, huddling next to it until she was warm enough to consider her next most pressing concern, hunger. Johnny had dug a pit and lined it with rocks to store the food they foraged. Her mouth actually watered at the thought of a meal of nuts, seeds, and unripe berries.

  Once she’d eaten, and the day loomed ahead, she dealt with her third concern, Johnny. It rather pleased her that he’d come in a poor third among her priorities. Beyond the simmering hurt and anger she felt, it gave her hope that she might be getting her emotional house in order where he was concerned. If there was anything more she could have done to gain his understanding and forgiveness, she didn’t know what it was. She couldn’t change what had happened, and she was beginning to think that enduring eighteen years of guilt was enough atonement for any sinner, no matter what the poor wretch had done.

  She busied herself with gathering fresh bedding for the lean-to and with replenishing their food stores, but as the morning wore on and Johnny didn’t return, she couldn’t deny that she was worried. She told herself that her concerns about him were pointless, that he’d probably gone back up the mountain to the cave. He was a big boy, after all, and he had survived several days alone before she arrived.

  As she packed the last of the supplies she’d gathered into the pit, she became aware of the grime caked on her arms. She scrubbed away at it with her fingers, knowing it was hopeless. She was as ripe as a bag lady, covered with pungent layers of sweat and Mother Nature’s plenitude. Even her hair was matted and tangled with leaves and twigs. She needed a bath, a shampoo. “A manicure,” she murmured, smiling at how absurd a prospect that was.