by Andrea Jones
Lean Wolf caught her, shocked, and stared down at her agony. With the strength of his arms, he sustained his new wife’s failing frame.
Cecco leveled the other gun. Another shot exploded, another ear-gutting roar that pounded inside Lean Wolf’s chest. And, again, Red Hand convulsed. She turned her face up to his. As he braced her bleeding body in his hold, it slackened. Still gazing up at him, she moaned, and dropped her head. A liquid trickle flowed from the corner of her mouth. It became a crimson stream— a stream that matched her blood-red hand.
Lean Wolf groaned beneath his breath, “Red Hand…”
In disbelief, he stood immobile before the entrance to his cave. Caught in concern for her, when he should have run, he hesitated. This woman had blocked the pirate’s shot. She made herself a sacrifice, and, for that act, the pirate murdered her. Cecco, whose passion had finally made him reckless, remained where he stood, his dark eyes defiant, his guns outstretched and smoking. Lean Wolf’s nostrils filled with the stench of black powder— the breath of the beast that had killed her. With his arms full of Red Hand, bleeding her being away, he couldn’t turn to look at the Black Chief, but he detected no sign from him— another ruthless brute.
Moved by her love for him, Lean Wolf felt his spirit awaken. How many times, side by side with White Bear— as youths, as hunters, as men who’d earned their names— had he knelt to murmur his respect in longtime tradition? He was unaccustomed to revealing his feelings but, in this grisly hour, Lean Wolf did so, and handsomely. With a reverence he had not observed for years, the Silent Hunter spoke the age-old chant:
“Creature of the woodland. I revere your sacrifice.” In his eyes he felt the scald of tears, which for so many moons abandoned him.
When Red Hand’s lips moved, her third-time husband bent close. He listened to the language of the Storyteller, the utterance that had to be the last words she would speak.
“Lean Wolf,” she said, her voice no longer clear, but straining. Her hands crushed the flowers, and from their broken stems a sweet, moist smell arose. He also smelled an odor more familiar to a huntsman. It was the essence that clung to his own copper skin: the scent of blood, newly drawn, and warm. With effort, she spoke again. Her voice was guttural now.
“Lean Wolf, Silent Hunter.”
It was the voice of a predator.
“Your wife is a silent huntress, too.” The flowers fell from her grip. “You never heard me stalking.”
He felt a movement of her arm, and then, suddenly, a piercing needle-prick of pain. He thought she’d caught a thorn among the roses. The pricking sensation sharpened, and Lean Wolf became aware it was a dagger.
Before he could stop her, Red Hand jammed the dagger deep, beneath his ribs. She plunged it upward, until it pierced his lung. Red hot jolts of pain bolted through his body. He squeezed his fingers, he opened his mouth in protest, but he found he had no breath to curse her. The blade, driven by Red Hand, gouged his innards, a spearing torch of fire. In a final, lethal thrust, she twisted it. Like the love he bore his wife, it tore the inner workings of his gut. With that cut, Red Hand disappeared, and, in her place, Jill Red-Hand made her kill.
“Hear me, Husband. I grant you all the choices you gave me.”
Lean Wolf gripped her, unable even to wheeze, and he sensed her men drawing near to guard her. Her wicked smile, made savage by her teeth, was tinted with crimson. Her eyes glowed green, like her totem tiger’s. In a final burst of instinct, he reached for the knife at his knee.
Jill Red-Hand got it first. Leaving her dagger embedded in his entrails, she counted coup, slapping the flat of his own knife, once, upon his cheekbone. As his skin stung and his vision dimmed, he reached out his scarlet hand to cup her jaw. When his arm went lax and dropped, her feral face was daubed as if with war paint. Surging all over his body, now, was the sensation he formerly craved: he burned in the heat of Red Hand’s redness. His legs went weak with it; his knees struck the ground, and he fell down at her feet. With one hand he groped the gravel path and found the boulder, but the strength of his arms, well known among the women of the tribe, had finally failed him.
Lean Wolf’s heart stopped beating. Jill Red-Hand had made sure of it.
CHAPTER 35
Eyes of the Tigress
Red-Handed Jill looked down upon her victim, his hunting knife hot in her hand. She spat the crimson liquid from her mouth. It formed a blot upon the gravel. Next to it, condensed by the height of the sun, her own shadow lay across Lean Wolf.
A rush of satisfaction coursed through her spirit. Savoring the moment of victory, she breathed deeply of the lush forest air. She had stalked the beast; he lay before her, tamed.
As she anticipated, she was possessed by the urge to shout her triumph aloud. The shout felt like a bubble under water, forcing its way to her surface. Out of caution, Jill delayed it. To free her cry now might prove dangerous, drawing observers to the fate of Lean Wolf. Yet, when she could loose her voice, it would resonate all the more savagely for the wait. The force of its rising made her heart thump in double time.
Two larger shadows joined her third-time husband where he lay. Jill did not look up. “We must work quickly,” she said.
But the men already knew it. None of the three was certain what effect this kill would have upon Jill, nor when. Still, Hook and Cecco spent a precious moment to survey her, assuring themselves that the dead man, so much larger and stronger than she, had not injured her in his last desperate seconds.
“Amore mia…you are magnificent,” Cecco stated, simply. His deep brown eyes were alive with emotion, but he said no more.
Hook set his hand on Jill’s shoulder. His voice was fierce, and gentle. “Madam Red-Hand.”
Jill raised her gaze to each of them, but no reply came to her lips. She registered the concern on their faces; she sensed their wish to intervene on her behalf, yet the moment had not come to give herself over to their care. As Jill’s limbs began to tremble, a sense of urgency prodded her. She knew that, in a very little time, her madness must overtake her.
She beheld the Silent Hunter, fixing the sight in her memory. Dwarfed by the mass of his musculature, the grip of her jewel-studded dagger protruded from beneath his ribs. It glared with sunlight, and the colors of the gems blurred in her vision. The dominant hue, the hue that continued to bloom, was ruby. With her lip twisting, she pulled her weapon from his wound. The drag of her blade through his flesh repulsed her, yet her wilder self thrilled. One of the men— she didn’t look to see who— took both of the blades from her hands. He replaced them with a kerchief, and she dabbed at the wet on her face, and wiped her hands. Then she dropped it, to stoop before the entrance to the cave, and slink inside.
She had not entered this cage since Lean Wolf first carried her in. Today, Jill reversed their roles. Now the Silent Hunter was the captive to be carried in and trapped here. The thought sent another wave of victory through her core, and then and there her triumph nearly brought her blood-rage to the boil. Determined on her purpose, Jill tamped it down again and made herself move on, to pass the rocky overhang and claim this place as the spoils of her conquest.
But in her unsteady state she was assaulted by the smells— the pine pitch, the animal musk from the furs on his pallet, the primordial air of the cave’s own loam, and, not least in its potency, the rusted-metal scent of blood on her body. All these odors combined to evoke the night of her abduction. In this atmosphere she detected, first, her own former helplessness, and then the scene conjured the man who caged her here.
Deliberately, she moved to step on the soft bed of pelts, where the sense of weakness vanished as she revisited the moment this vengeance was conceived, in heat and in seed, like a child born to go bad. Jill closed her eyes, and, holding fast to her wits, purged her being of all impulses but the actions that lay ahead of her. She began by gathering up a blanket, to toss it out the door. One task at a time, she told herself. The hardest part was past. Jill had killed her husband. Now she
had to learn to live with him.
All around her danced the figures that Lean Wolf painted on the wall in her absence. Under the greenish glow shed by the moss on the ceiling, the men and the beasts appeared mythical, as otherworldly as the warrior himself had seemed when she first saw him towering in his underground realm. The figures became nearly real as the flickering light of the pine knot lent its motion.
Jill looked closer, and her hot blood ran chill. In the painting, two winged braves flew, hounded from the village with arrows. Awaiting them in the forest, a wolf crouched with its fangs bared. With a twinge of horror, Jill realized that her act of viricide had come none too soon. As she had feared, Lean Wolf had slated Rowan and Lightly to be his next victims. Had Jill simply sailed away from him today, her son and his lover would have suffered slaughter, or something worse.
But Rowan and Lightly were only two whom Lean Wolf threatened. These walls were alive with the Silent Hunter’s thoughts, and the intrigue of his dreams. He had painted a blackbird on the wing, which Jill now knew to represent Raven, and a doe, for his first wife, Red Fawn. She saw herself, too, her scarlet hand distinctly rendered, a fair-haired woman wading in the sea. Jill shrank back from the wall, and gasped as she trod on something rough, another new element here in Lean Wolf’s lair. Lengths of hempen rope curled next to his sleeping pallet. Her imagination filled in the facts. Entering here with her new husband, she might never have escaped from his snare. Who knew what fates Silent Hunter had planned for each of the people whose effigies he depicted? It was well, Jill thought, that, with two strikes of two knives, she had severed his hold on their lives.
The men spoke low, tending to the scene outside. A scraping sound told her that one of them was turning the gravel to bury the scarlet stains. Jill opened her coat to tug the bladder of blood from beneath it, still oozing down the string she’d yanked to pull its cork. She tossed the contraption in a corner, where soon her blood-soiled clothing would join it. As she gathered Lean Wolf’s weapons, Hook and Cecco scuffled in with their burden, hauling the carcass on the blanket. Once inside, Hook with his one hand and Cecco with two, slid the body onto the furs. In the bed where he might have cut off Jill’s life, Lean Wolf himself now lay cut, and lifeless.
It was strange to see him inert— he, whose every muscle had coiled with the vigor of a snake. Lean Wolf’s ribs were bound up with cloth, the gouge stanched, but his blood, still creeping, seeped through the material. Jill knelt down beside him, her knees sinking into the furs. The green-glowing light tinged his skin. She straightened his limbs— such weighty limbs— so that this man might lie in what dignity death could render. With her scarlet fingers, she closed his eyelids, blinding forever those black eyes that had watched and spied and connived. As in his life, so in his death, Jill arranged his bow and his quiver within reach of his hands, and she strapped his hunting knife in its sheath at Lean Wolf’s knee. Smoothing his hair, she laid his long locks over his shoulders. When she gestured, Cecco brought the flowers, and she directed him to set the basket of blooms at the warrior’s feet. Their sweet scents mingled with the smell of his lifeblood. As still as the dead man lay, Jill herself felt a tremor that mounted in her muscles, minute by minute.
“Lean Wolf Silent Hunter: my third-time husband,” she mouthed, uncertain if she spoke aloud or whispered. Susurrating, her voice flowed back from the walls that surrounded them, weaving its spell of binding. This time, the spell ensnared only one. “Red Hand from the Sea delivers your restless spirit to a place of passage. The Dark Hunting ground lies open to you.” Jill raised her empty hand, and felt Hook settle her dagger in her grip. “As you wander your way toward the ancestors, I, a woman and a wife, free you from the Land of the Living.” With a slash of her dagger, Jill cut the strap of Red Fawn’s marriage bracelet. It fell from Lean Wolf’s wrist. Finally, Jill pricked at the knot of her own wedding token. As the tie loosened, she drew the orange kerchief from Lean Wolf’s biceps. Her marriage-curse had done its work. Her spirit bounded free of her burden, and she shed this husband as a serpent sloughs its skin.
Jill teetered on her knees. While she worked, she’d felt increasingly light-headed. Her dizziness deepened now, into trance. The dagger was removed from her hold, and her crimson hand gaped suddenly empty. Someone took charge of the bracelet and kerchief as well. Her arm was seized and supported. Hook’s velvet voice came to her, and his warm breath coursed in her ear: “Never fear, Jill. Your men attend you.” Cecco loomed at her other side, and the men raised her up. With tearing fingers, she plucked her jacket off, and then the blood-encrusted breeches, and she kicked them away. The cave’s interior distorted, as if she viewed it from the wrong end of a spyglass. She lost her balance and stumbled. She was not allowed to fall; her upper arms were gripped, and her bare feet dragged in the dust. She smelled the air of outdoors and, soon after, the thunder of the waterfall throbbed, like the beat of her heathen heart.
The men lowered her to the earth, leaning her back against a scratchy tree. Some kind of garment covered her, but she shivered. She still inhaled the odor of blood, rising from the heat of her flesh. When she spread out her hands, they were splotched with it— not just the inside of her right hand, her distinctive feature, but the back of it, too, and crusting under her fingernails. Next the boulder crunched over gravel, sealing the tomb, and her shaking turned into a shudder. She panicked, remembering the feel of entrapment that sound stirred in her the first time she heard it. Her stomach lurched, and when she turned her head to wretch, supporting arms returned, ushering her into the woods. She saw red in the grass, and tasted the cherries she had crushed in her mouth, to imitate blood. She no longer remembered; why should she mimic blood, when so much of it sprang from her husband? Her belly writhed again, but this time in hunger. Her hand was ravenous for the dagger.
“The frenzy has begun in earnest.” Hook watched Jill’s gaze roving. “The eyes of the tigress burn green, and she seeks for her claws.” He slid his hook behind his back. “You must carry her, Captain.”
“Aye,” Cecco answered. “I have never seen her more abandoned or beautiful.” With reverence, he lifted Jill up and into his arms. “Bellezza, we are with you.” He could not tell if she heard him. Her fingers trailed along his sash, questing for the knife he had already laid aside.
They inspected the scene before forsaking it, to be certain no sign of the killing remained. When Lean Wolf failed to return to his people, the braves who tracked him must find no trace. Jill had told them that he kept his lair a secret. Their hope was that, as independently as he lived within the tribe, his disappearance would not be marked until a day or two after the pirates set sail. Jill had laid these plans far in advance with Hook and Cecco, knowing that she would be incapable of thinking clearly now. As she had guessed, her impulse at this moment was to cause harm, rather than conceal it.
When her quest for Cecco’s weapon went unsatisfied, Jill wrestled to break free of his hold. He undertook to soothe her agitation while Hook seized a cluster of leaves and smudged the markings on the gravel path. Hook took up the canvas bag in which he and Cecco hid their weapons from Jill’s scavenging glances. It hung misshapen over his shoulder, holding the spade they had used to turn the gravel, along with Hook’s sword, Cecco’s knife, Jill’s jeweled dagger, and the four pistols Hook and Cecco had borne— the two Cecco discharged in blasts of powder without shot, and the one each man had hidden from Lean Wolf, loaded and potent and tucked at their backs. Thus Jill had seen to her own protection. The next step in safeguarding her lay in her men’s hands alone, and, in her present state, she would not make that effort easy.
They strode the short path toward the waterfall. Hook had covered Jill with his shirt, and, except for his leather harness, he, like Cecco, was bare-chested. They were both streaked with blood. In the past, Cecco carried Jill with ease, but she hadn’t fought him then. He staggered when she kicked and struggled, then he stopped to set her down and gather her wrists in one hand, protecting his flesh f
rom her fingernails. She did not articulate her objections when he bundled her up again— at this stage of her lunacy, even a scream would be too human an act— but she grunted her frustration in heaving, feline hisses. With his hand full and his claw in hiding, Hook could do little to help.
Both men were relieved when they reached the pond. Hook laid down the bag and concealed it, with his tricorn and its blue jay feather, in the foliage at the water’s edge. He levered off his boots. Even as Cecco gripped her wrists, Jill tore at the blouse with her teeth. On it she smelled the leather of Hook’s harness, associating it with his weapon, and she craved it. Holding her fast, the two men stepped from the grass and waded into the water.
The pool’s temperature was tepid, not cold enough to shock her, and not warm enough to calm her ferocity. At its center it was shallow enough that the men could stand, but when Cecco set Jill on her feet, the lake rose to her ribs, and she swayed in it. As a precaution, Cecco unwound his gypsy sash and retied it, tethering Jill’s waist to his. Between them, Hook and Cecco towed her toward the falls. Hook slashed the tie of her hair, and her long braid floated on the surface, the strands loosening as the current tossed it about. Swirls of red rose up all around her, where the lifeblood of her husband lifted from her skin to drift away. The falling water grew louder as they neared, drowning the sounds of the woodlands, smothering the huffs of Jill’s panting. Despite the temperate surroundings, her teeth began to chatter. Hook touched her cheek to measure her fever. Instantly, she turned on him, and he drew his fingers away before she could bite them.
As the stream fell from the mountain above, its force broke on an outcropping, then it formed a gleaming green curtain. Fed from that flow, behind the ledge where Hook and Jill often sported— accessible only by flight— the cavern pooled with sun-warmed water, an ideal enclosure for bathing. Jill had hidden towels and clothing in a dry spot there, for use once her turmoil came to an end. The overflow poured from that ledge into this pond at its base, and, in its own kind of turmoil, the waters roiled noisily about the three waders.
