After the Thunder

by Genell Dellin

  He was off the horse and running before they reached the steps to the veranda; he pounded across it and burst into the house. Blocking everything else from his mind, he tried to open his spirit, tried to feel where, exactly, Cotannah was.

  Upstairs.

  But something was wrong, he couldn’t get to her this way. He stopped in his tracks at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Phillips! Open the door!”

  Tay’s voice.

  “Break it down,” Emily screamed. “Brother Jones! Come help Tay break down this door. It’s solid oak.”

  Loud pounding knocks and more yelling echoed through the house.

  He whirled on his heel and ran through the empty parlor, stepped out through the window onto the veranda, darted across it, and immediately shinnied up one of the posts to the veranda above it, threw himself bodily over the baluster rail. Cotannah was in the room immediately to his right, he could feel her spirit calling to his.

  Below him, the Lighthorsemen and the others were just turning into the long driveway from the road, with their horses’ feet all drumming against the earth. He breathed a little prayer of thanks. They hadn’t stopped him, and now he would save Cotannah.

  The window was closed, and one slight tug proved it was locked. He could see Cotannah’s feet and her full skirt hanging off the bed, with Phillips looming like an evil monster above her upper body.

  Choking her!

  “Phillips!” he yelled. “Turn her loose or the Black Lightning will strike you!” Then he hid his face behind his shoulder and drove his elbow into the glass, his spirit reaching ahead to feel hers.

  It’s all right. I’m here. Cotannah, my darling, my precious one, I’m here.

  She swam back into consciousness in a haze of happiness wondering where the rock that had fallen on her throat had gone. Her whole neck was hurting horribly, yet the pain of it passed her by, wiped out by joy. She opened her eyes to the lamplight when the tinkling bells began to ring and tried to think what was happening.

  The next breath caught in her hurting throat, she gasped for more air and turned her head.

  Walks-With-Spirits burst right through the window, half-naked, flying straight through, shattering glass everywhere, hurtling magically through the air with his bare feet tucked up against his tight bottom and his arms reaching for the prize like a stickball player straining to catch the ball. Except that this time his prize was also his prey, and he was stretching his big muscles to get hold of Phillips with hands like a hungry eagle’s claws instead of a playing stick.

  He was here! Oh, thank God, Walks-With-Spirits was here! By what miracle? How had he ever gotten away? Or had he not gone to Tuskahoma yet?

  She wasn’t sure how much time had passed. All she knew was that he had come to save her and he was right here in her room, wearing only his breeches, fringes flying, his face fierce as Basak’s on the attack.

  Phillips turned to meet him, but he never had a chance. Walks-With-Spirits collided with him like a tornado hitting a house.

  There was another horrible thud, right then, this one at the door, which came crashing in to fall flat on the floor with an awful screaming noise of tearing wood that sounded almost human.

  Helpless to speak or move, Cotannah glimpsed Tay and Emily and Brother Jones all watching Phillips and Walks-With-Spirits fight. Emily’s face was frighteningly pale.

  She saw Walks-With-Spirits, with Tay helping him now, throw Phillips face down and start to tie his hands behind him with Tay’s belt. Emily ran to her, tears pouring down her cheeks.

  Tay jerked the belt tight around Phillips’s wrists and stood up, setting one booted foot deliberately in the small of his back to hold him down.

  Then Walks-With-Spirits got up and came toward her. He broke her heart. The cross of white paint stood out against his gleaming copper-colored skin, marking the target, and it made her tremble to think how close he had come to losing his life, how close she had come to losing him.

  He filled her eyes. Every step he took moved something inside her, some deep core of her that had stayed locked away for a long, long time, perhaps since she was born.

  Or since she was old enough to know that she had no mother.

  And no father.

  For the first time since Phillips grabbed her, she was able to take in great gulps of healing air, able to breathe deeply in a calming rhythm that soothed her soul. No, no. It was the sight of Walks-With-Spirits, alive and unhurt that comforted her beyond belief.

  He was scooping her up then, into his arms, he was holding her close, so close, that they were one body once more. She nestled her cheek onto his naked chest, gloried in the feel of her skin against his skin, and laid her ear against the steady, pounding beat of his heart. Safe, it said. Safe. We are both safe now.

  Slowly, the shivering inside her began to subside. He held her even tighter, rocking gently back and forth on the balls of his feet while he held her in his arms.

  Emily hovered near her.

  “Her throat is nearly crushed!” she cried. “You can see the marks of every one of his fingers on her neck!”

  The room quieted completely.

  “Get up, Phillips,” Tay growled, dragging the man to his feet as he spoke. “Get up and tell us why you were choking her.”

  Phillips’s face was so red with rage that it was almost purple.

  “Because she’s a sneaky, lying little thief!” he cried, in a tone so aggrieved that a person would think he was the one who’d just been strangled and choked half to death. “If I could’ve found that bottle of poison, I’d have poured the rest of it down her throat.”

  Tay slammed him against the wall.

  “What poison?”

  “The damned monkshood, that’s what poison! The poison that killed Jacob! None of you simpleminded idiots ever even thought that he might’ve been poisoned, now did you?”

  “Why’d you want to kill your own partner?”

  “He was trying to back out of our deal with the Boomers. I couldn’t do without that money after it started coming in—I didn’t have a rich father to give me anything I wanted the way Jacob did.”

  He said the last as if it absolved him completely.

  Tay glared at him.

  “What deal with the Boomers?”

  “The deal for Jacob and me to talk up white settlers and individual allotments.”

  “They were paying you both for that?”

  “Yes! A lot of money! And that fool Jacob was going to quit on them just because you had heard rumors about it.”

  “So you were the person in the mercantile he spoke to right before he died?”

  “Yes.”

  “Had you gone there to meet with your Boomers?”

  “Yeah, and I kept him quiet while they were there, but when they left us, we were having a drink and Jacob repeated what he’d told me after the pecan-picking social—that he was going to quit them very soon. If he’d gone through with it, the Boomers would’ve killed us both! Really, listen to me, everybody …”

  He was calming down, now, and he looked around the room for a sympathetic face.

  “… if I hadn’t killed Jacob, the Boomers would have. He wouldn’t have lived much longer no matter what. They would’ve killed us both.”

  Cotannah motioned for Walks-With-Spirits to set her down, and she stood on her own feet in front of him. Her legs were trembling, but she slid her feet apart for balance and dug in her heels to stand straight. He placed his hands on her shoulders for support.

  “Well, Walks-With-Spirits wasn’t about to be killed by the Boomers!” she cried in a voice so hoarse she couldn’t recognize it. “You’re the one who was about to kill him!” Her throat hurt terribly, but she couldn’t be quiet. “You’ll go to Fort Smith and stand before Hanging Judge Parker!” she announced, as if she were pronouncing sentence on him herself. “He’ll hang you high, and that’s what you deserve, Peter Phillips!”

  Then fists pounded on the front door and Rosie let t
he Lighthorse in. They rushed up the stairs and into the room, stopping in their tracks when they saw the situation. While Tay talked to them and turned over his prisoner to them, Emily hugged both Cotannah and Walks-With-Spirits, together, and then the two of them just stood still, wrapped tight in each other’s arms.

  “Come downstairs, everyone, and have something warm to drink,” Emily cried, as she stepped between them and the rest of the people in the room. “We truly have cause to celebrate the morning.”

  Cotannah glanced out the window with its jagged edges of pane sticking out from the wooden frame, past the bits of glass on the floor starting to sparkle now with the faint pink-and-yellow light of the dawn. The others were beginning to follow Emily out of the room but it didn’t matter to her who was there and who wasn’t. The only person she could see was Walks-With-Spirits.

  She looked up at him and cupped her hands around his dear face.

  “Was our star out? Did you see it on the way here?”

  “All I saw on the way here was you.”

  She started to pull him toward the window, then realized that his feet were bare and the broken glass was everywhere. Tears sprang to her eyes when she thought of what he’d risked to save her, and she reached to touch every one of the small, bleeding cuts scattered over his shoulders and arms. Some even on his face.

  Soon she would attend to them, but right now their star was about to fade before the sun.

  “Let’s go out to the veranda from the hallway,” she said.

  They walked hand in hand, out onto the second-floor veranda and across it to look up at the sky. She slid into his arms again the moment they stood at the rail. He laid his palms flat on her abdomen and pressed her hips into the hardness of his body while they looked for their star.

  “I don’t know if we can see it from here …” she said.

  “There,” he said.

  And, indeed, there it was, shining gloriously in the southern sky, their own Blue River star.

  “Thank you, for my life,” he said.

  “And thank you, for my soul.”

  She gazed at their star for a moment, and then she tilted her head back against his shoulder to look up at him. He brushed back the strands of her hair that the wind was blowing across her face and bent his head to kiss her.

  Epilogue

  South Star Hill

  Choctaw Nation

  Late Spring 1877

  Cotannah snuggled deeper into Walks-With-Spirits’s arms, with her back against him spoon-fashion, and took several deep breaths of the cool, fresh air drifting in through the windows of their new bedroom. Outside, the birds chittered wildly because it was almost morning and entirely spring.

  They were echoes of her happy heart.

  She drew up her knees and hugged her rounded tummy, marveling that she could have had so little such a short time ago and now be rich beyond counting.

  But she counted anyway, on her fingers, silently, so she wouldn’t wake her husband. Her husband! Just thinking the words made her smile.

  He was first on her list of riches, tied with the baby coming this summer. The three of them, plus Aunt Ancie and Uncle Jumper, now asleep in the smaller log cabin that William Sowers had built for them a stone’s throw away from this huge one, would be a good beginning on the big family she’d longed for since her girlhood days, when she’d begged Cade to come home and stay, the days when she’d prayed for the Great Spirit never to let him go out wandering again.

  Cade!

  She froze in place, her blood racing. Then she twisted around, threw off the sheet, and sat up, shaking Walks-With-Spirits by the arm.

  “Shadow, wake up! Oh, darling, I just remembered what day it is. Maggie and Cade will be here today.”

  Her words must have been a bolt of lightning because they brought on a roll of thunder. The rattling thunder of wheels. The muffled thunder of horses’ hooves.

  “They’re here! How can that be? Why, it’s barely even daylight!”

  “It’s all right,” he murmured, in his most soothing tone. “It’s all right, darling. It’ll take them a while to drive down the lane.”

  He sat up sleepily and looked at her for a moment before he reached for his breeches.

  She jumped out of bed, grabbed a wrapper, threw it around her shoulders, and ran on bare feet to the window to see if they were in sight.

  “Oh, the rocks on this ridge make the sound carry so far!” she cried. “I can’t tell where they are.”

  He cocked his head and listened while he put on his clothes.

  “Sounds like they’re halfway in from the road,” he said.

  “I’ll stir up the fire and put the coffee on,” she said. “I want to impress Cade with how domestic I am.”

  Walks-With-Spirits laughed as he followed her to the kitchen.

  “He’s going to be so glad to see you, ’Tannah, he won’t care if there’s breakfast or not.”

  “Well, I will,” she said. “I tell you, Shadow, you don’t know all the criticisms my bossy big brother made of me the last time I saw him. I intend to make him eat his words.”

  But when the coaches rolled in and her beloved Cade’s deep, familiar voice called, “Hello, this house! It’s the Chisk-Kos from Texas out here,” every silly intention she’d ever had flew right out of her head.

  When she and Walks-With-Spirits were standing in their own front yard welcoming Cade and dear Maggie and the rambunctious five-year-old twins, Cole and Miranda, plus two-year-old Doak who was toddling after his brother and sister as hard as he could, she knew once again that nothing said or done in the past was important anymore. All that meant anything was that all of them were together, right here, right now.

  Cade kept his arm around her shoulders as they turned to go into the house, even while he was talking to his new brother-in-law.

  “Sorry we couldn’t get here for the wedding,” he told him. “But now I’m glad we waited so we can see this beautiful place of yours.”

  “We’ve only been moved in for a couple of weeks,” Cotannah said. “Emily and Tay were so good to put us up at Tall Pine until we chose which section of the tribal land we wanted to improve and got our house and barn built. And Ancie and Jumper’s cabin and the hired man’s, too, of course.”

  “Are you raising crops or cattle or both?” Cade asked.

  “Cotannah’s started a horse herd for breeding saddle horses to sell, Uncle Jumper’s overseeing the hired man in a big vegetable patch and we’re raising hay,” Walks-With-Spirits answered. “But mostly we raise wild animals, rocks, and trees.”

  “And babies,” Cotannah said proudly, as Maggie reached out to squeeze her hand.

  Cade looked down at her and grinned.

  “Babies? Do you think it’s twins?”

  “Oh, my goodness, I don’t think I’m strong enough for that,” she said, laughing, looking at Cole and Miranda running through the house ahead of the adults, squealing and calling to each other as they explored the new place. “I’m hoping to have mine one at a time, but I want a whole houseful of them.”

  They walked through the archway from the parlor into the huge kitchen with its two enormous rock fireplaces centered in opposite log walls, the shiny new cookstove in the far corner, and a beautiful, round oak table ensconced in the very middle of the room. The new sunlight was coming in the south windows to make the lamplight unnecessary, the smell of coffee and frying bacon filled the whole house.

  “I’m going to make flapjacks,” Cotannah said, with an arch little glance at Cade. “And once Cade has washed the dishes we’ll all go up to the school and you can meet the students that are mine and Emily’s and Miss Jane’s.”

  Maggie burst out laughing.

  “Cade insisted on getting up very early this morning and coming in here at dawn so he could tease you about sleeping late and not cooking breakfast,” she said, “but I do believe you’re ready for him.”

  She stood on tiptoe to give him a quick kiss.

  “Y
our little sister’s got it all under control, and the joke’s on you, Cade.”

  He laughed and hugged his wife in one arm, his sister in the other.

  “Maggie, do you recognize our ’Tannah?”

  He stopped in his tracks, then, and held Cotannah out in front of him with both hands on her shoulders.

  “I feel I hardly know you,” he said, “for years and years you did nothing but have a good time and indulge yourself and now, all of a sudden, you’re a wife, soon a mother, a teacher, a breeder in the horse business, a cook and … what are you doing, trying to make up for lost time?”

  “No,” she said, and reached for Walks-With-Spirits’s hand, held it against her cheek. “I’m only trying to live, truly live, the time I have now. It’s something I learned from my husband, the healer.”

  About the Author

  GENELL DELLIN was born and grew up in what once was the Choctaw Nation. She still lives in Oklahoma with her husband and son.

  AFTER THE THUNDER is the third and final book in her Choctaw trilogy which includes RED SKY WARRIOR and SILVER MOON SONG.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Avon Romantic Treasures by

  Genell Dellin

  COMANCHE RAIN

  RED SKY WARRIOR

  SILVER MOON SONG

  If You’ve Enjoyed This Book,

  Be Sure to Read These Other

  AVON ROMANTIC TREASURES

  BRIGHTER THAN THE SUN by Julia Quinn

  THE COURTSHIP OF CADE KOLBY by Lori Copeland

  FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN by Cathy Maxwell