Thunder Moon

by Lori Handeland

  I drew in a breath, captivated by the sensations. I was used to being handled differently. I was a tall woman who wore a gun. Guys never treated me as if I were spun glass. I didn’t want them to.

  My lips barely parted, his tongue flicked between, caressing both in one stroke. He lifted his mouth, I moaned in protest, but he pressed gentle kisses across my brow, beneath my eyes, down my nose. Wherever he touched, my skin warmed. I didn’t want to open my eyes, to see his face, to remember who he was, who I was, how crazy kissing a stranger in an abandoned storefront on Center Street must be.

  When he kissed me harder, deeper, his tongue delving in and stroking my own, my nipples went hard again; my whole body came alive.

  He raised his head. I could feel him hovering, waiting and watching, his breath mingling with my own. Would we or wouldn’t we?

  Slowly I opened my eyes to an empty hallway.

  Chapter 5

  For an instant I doubted my sanity, until I caught and at last recognized the scent of the balm—fresh-cut grass beneath bright sunshine—then lifted a finger to my face. The tip came away shiny. Ian Walker was as real as the cream on my skin.

  I strode to the open doorway. The room was cluttered with furniture, boxes, suitcases. I guess the moving van had delivered something. He stood near the window, shoulders slumped, head bent. What was wrong with him?

  Then I saw the picture—a woman in a white dress, standing on a prairie as the wind ruffled her skirt. She was tiny, petite, young, with long hair like an inky waterfall against her smiling cheek. The photo had been taken in black-and-white, then brushed with pastel colors, giving it the impression of age, although I’d seen the same technique used more recently, too.

  Ian lifted his hand and shoved his own hair back from his face. The wedding band flashed in the sunlight. No wonder he’d scooted off at the first opportunity.

  His shoulders slumped even more as he exhaled. He didn’t turn around but continued to stare out the window as the streets below became busier and noisier.

  If he could be this broken up about kissing another woman, maybe he wasn’t such a prick after all. Then I remembered that kiss, what he’d made me feel, how my body still hummed with it, and my anger flared at the loss of something that could have been so good.

  “Where’s your wife?” My voice was as cold as my heart.

  His shoulders twitched as if I’d slashed him with a whip. “Gone.”

  The chill that had spread over me evaporated in the heat of embarrassment. Wedding ring on the right hand must mean widower, and I’d taunted him with the memory of his wife.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Not your fault. I forgot—” He stopped, shook his head, didn’t finish.

  I wondered how long she’d been gone. How she had died. If he’d ever get over her.

  I was such an idiot. I didn’t even like this guy. He’d kissed me once better than I’d ever been kissed before, and I was mooning over him like a lovesick teenager.

  I’d been a lovesick teenager. Weren’t we all once? I never wanted to be one again.

  “Here.” He snapped the cap back on the jar and held it out to me, though his gaze remained on the window. “Use it whenever the pain returns.”

  Right now my face felt great—as if I’d never been popped in the nose at all. I took the jar. “What’s in this?”

  “Rattlesnake oil.”

  I waited for him to laugh, but he didn’t.

  “You’re serious?”

  He turned. His skin pale, his pupils so large his eyes appeared black, fine lines bracketed his mouth. I rearranged his age in my mind from late twenties to midthirties, which made more sense considering the medical degrees. If they were real.

  “Rattlesnake oil is a common balm for rheumatism and arthritis,” he said. “It works for bruises, too, if you say the right words.”

  I lifted my brows.

  “Do you know anything about Cherokee medicine?” he asked.

  “I thought we’d established I’m a cop, not a medicine woman.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  I started to get annoyed again. Why did he have that effect on me? Maybe because he kept telling me what I was and who I should be.

  “You think I wear this charming outfit because it flatters my ass?” I indicated the ugly brown uniform that bagged at the breasts and sagged in the butt. I didn’t have a bad body, but you’d never know it by looking at me in this rag, which was probably the idea.

  “You might be a cop,” he said, “but you’re a medicine woman, too. Even if you don’t know the way. You were born to be who you are, and who you are is the great-granddaughter of Rose Scott.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes again. “I’m sheriff of Lake Bluff. That’s who I was born to be.”

  In truth, my dad had expected one of the boys to take over, but they’d hightailed it out of town the instant they’d turned eighteen. Good old Grace, who’d been begging for an ounce of Daddy’s attention her entire life, had stayed and assumed the position when he died.

  I didn’t mind. I liked my job; I was good at it. Besides, there wasn’t much call for medicine women these days.

  “You’ll discover your power one day.” He tilted his head and the white of the eagle feather caught the sunlight and sparkled. “One day soon, I think.”

  I remembered how the small shaft of moonlight had glanced off the feather just last night. “What were you doing in the forest during a storm?”

  “Is that a crime?”

  “Not unless I can arrest people for stupidity, and as much as I’d like to, lawyers tend to frown on that.”

  “Lawyers frown on everything. Considering your accident, it was lucky for you that I was stupid.”

  “I’d have been all right. Why did you disappear?”

  “I had things that needed to be done.”

  Before I could point out how uninformative that was, my cell phone buzzed. One glance at the display and I sighed. “Excuse me.” I accepted the call. “What is it, Cal?”

  “You okay?”

  “Peachy. Cut to the chase.”

  “Sounds like you’re back to normal. Nose broke?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Grace—,” he began.

  “My nose works. It’s in the center of my face, and I can smell just fine with it.” Against my will my eyes were drawn to Ian Walker, whom I’d been smelling far too much of.

  “We’ve had a lot of calls since last night,” Cal continued.

  “I’m shocked.”

  Cal ignored me. He’d learned fast. “A lot of them were about birds.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “Flocks of really big crows swooping low over cars. Birds flying into windows. Down chimneys.”

  “Is there a Hitchcock revival somewhere in the vicinity?”

  “Very funny.”

  I hadn’t been kidding. Every time a scary movie played in the area we had a rash of complaints that mirrored the plot. With every new Friday the 13th release— would they ever end?—people saw Jason all over the place.

  “Could be the storm just threw them out of whack,” I said. “Don’t birds have radar?”

  “I think that’s bats.”

  “Whatever. We can’t do anything about birds run amok. Anything serious I should know about?”

  “Downed trees. Electricity out. Someone lost a carport to a falling branch.”

  “Injuries?”

  “Nothing worse than that schnoz on you.”

  “Gee, thanks.” I paused for an instant. A bird had smashed into my window last night. I’d thought it a fluke, but I guess not. I’d have to call the Department of Natural Resources and find out their take on it as well as— “Did anyone happen to see a wolf?”

  “Why?” Cal asked. “Did you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But there aren’t any.”

  “Could be someone has been keeping one as a pet and it got out during the storm.”

 
“Could be,” he agreed. “I’ll ask around. You coming in soon?”

  “Very,” I said, and hung up.

  “Pet wolves are more dangerous than real ones,” Walker murmured. “They’re often a wolf-dog mix, which makes them unpredictable. They aren’t afraid of humans, but they’re still wild in a lot of ways.”

  “How do you know so much about them?”

  “I’ve known people who kept wolves. It never ended well.”

  I just bet it hadn’t.

  “If you’ve got a hybrid loose in these mountains you’d better catch it quick. Tame wolves tend to get themselves attacked by other animals, and then there’s a danger of—”

  “Rabies,” I finished.

  “So you’ve got a wolf that isn’t afraid of people, which is suddenly rabid.”

  I’d already been here and done this last summer. When a wolf that shouldn’t exist in the Blue Ridge Mountains had attacked a tourist, we’d thought the wolf was rabid—never mind how it had gotten here. But when the tourist became extremely hairy and jumped out a second-story window before loping away, we figured that “rabid” was often a euphemism for “lycanthropic.”

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, and did, ignoring the intent expression on Walker’s face and the curiosity in his eyes.

  A short while later I entered the Lake Bluff Sheriff’s Department. The place was hopping.

  We had nine full-time deputies and one part-time, along with three full-time dispatchers and one part-time on the payroll. Last night everyone had been called in, and from the crowd near the desks, most of them were still here. There had to be doughnuts.

  I made my way through the outer area, returning the greetings. Sure enough, a box of bakery sat on a desk—more muffins and bagels than doughnuts, although I saw a few crullers with my name on them.

  No one mentioned my swollen nose and dual black eyes. Cal must have warned them off. More and more I didn’t know how I’d gotten along without him.

  My office was a welcome respite from the chatter and the energy that came from having that many people in an enclosed space. I didn’t like crowds. I did better one-on-one.

  As soon as I’d taken the chair behind my desk, Cal appeared. “I’ve got every officer on the lookout for a vehicle with a dented front end. Also notified the repair shops in the county. We’ll find whoever hit you and then took off.”

  “Thanks.” I’d meant to do that myself, but I’d been a little distracted.

  “I also checked the reports from last night. No wolves. Just more of the really big crows and strange bird behavior.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Really big crows—you mean ravens?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  The knowledge wasn’t common. The only reason I knew was because I’d done a report in eighth-grade science. Never thought that bit of trivia would come in handy.

  “Ravens and crows aren’t the same,” I said. “You could call a raven a crow, since they’re in the crow family, but all crows aren’t ravens.”

  “How can you tell them apart?”

  “Ravens are about the size of a hawk and crows are more like pigeons.”

  “So people’s complaints about really big crows are probably not about crows at all.”

  “Probably not, although I hardly think it matters in this case.”

  “True.” He moved on. “I sent some of the guys out to check on the folks who don’t have phones.”

  “Good.” I began thumbing through my messages. Cal’s silence made me glance up. The expression on his face made me set the messages down. “What?”

  “One of them was dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Orel Vandross.”

  “He was still alive?” The guy had to be a hundred.

  “Until yesterday. According to the report, the officer found him in his bed.”

  “That’s the way to go—in your own bed near the century mark.”

  “Definitely. The funeral home picked him up. There won’t be a service. His family’s gone and his friends, too.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I don’t think he’ll care.”

  I cast Cal a sharp glance. Sometimes his gallows humor, no doubt learned on the front lines of several nasty wars, startled even me.

  “I had another joke on my desk this morning,” Cal said.

  “Already?”

  The Chuck Norris joke bandit had struck just yesterday with the ditty: When the boogeyman goes to sleep he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.

  Cal handed me a sheet of paper and I steeled myself before reading: Chuck Norris ordered a Big Mac at Burger King, and got one.

  I bit my lip to keep from laughing. Cal didn’t seem at all amused.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would Burger King make a Big Mac?”

  The man was so literal sometimes, he scared me.

  “Anyone see who put that on your desk?” I asked.

  “No, and I haven’t had a chance to check the security camera. Not that it’ll make a difference.”

  No matter how many times we ran over the security tapes, we never saw anyone put the jokes on Cal’s desk. Which was impossible. Nevertheless, new jokes continued to appear.

  “I’m going to call the DNR about the ravens,” I said. “Can you do something for me?”

  “Sure.”

  I wrote “Ian Walker, Baylor School of Medicine and British Institute of Homeopathy—Canada” on a piece of paper and handed it to him.

  “What is this?”

  “There’s a new doctor in town. Or at least he says he’s a doctor. Those are his credentials. Can you verify?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.” Cal peered at me. “I thought your face would be a lot worse today.”

  “You think this is good?”

  “Considering how it looked last night, definitely.” He headed out.

  I frowned, and for the first time since I’d been air-bagged, the motion of my face didn’t cause pain. Reaching into my desk, I withdrew the mirror I kept there just in case I had to check my teeth for spinach or my nose for—well, what we check our noses for—and held it up.

  My bruises were fading toward yellow, and my nose was half the size it had been an hour ago.

  I lowered the mirror and stared at the jar of balm on my desk as if it were an actual rattlesnake instead of just the oil.

  How could it have worked so fast?

  Chapter 6

  My heart whispered, Magic. My mind scoffed. Too much in my life and my job contradicted any sort of fairy tale. But I’d also seen amazing, unexplainable things whenever I’d been around my great-grandmother, not to mention everything that had happened in Lake Bluff last summer.

  On the one hand I figured the balm was just really good balm; on the other I wondered if the words Walker had used had been an equally powerful spell and, if so, where he had learned it.

  Regardless, I rubbed more rattlesnake oil into my face before I picked up the phone and called the Department of Natural Resources. After a few transfers I reached the office of Alan Sellers, bird geek. Quickly I told him what had happened in Lake Bluff.

  “Odd bird behavior after a strong storm isn’t unheard of,” he said in a nasal whine that had me imagining his colorless hair, pasty skin, and watery eyes.

  “So it’s nothing to worry about?”

  “Worry in what way?”

  “Coordinated attacks. Bird rabies?”

  His laugh disintegrated into a cough. I revised pale skin to the gray cast of a lifetime smoker. “You’ve heard the term ‘birdbrain’?”

  “Far more than I’d like.” It had been one of my brothers’ favorite insults.

  “Although recent studies have revealed that birds aren’t as dumb as originally thought, coordinated attacks are beyond the capacity of most species. A flock may follow the leader, they can even communicate information about where to find food, but they don’t have the brainpower to mount an attack.”

  “S
o Hitchcock was full of shit?”

  “Most movies are.”

  Smart man.

  “Also,” he continued, “rabies is a disease passed from mammal to mammal, so birds can’t get it. You say you have both crows and ravens?”

  “Hard to know for sure. We’ve had reports of really big crows, which I took to be ravens. Crows have never been all that common in Lake Bluff.”

  “Crows usually congregate near larger towns; ravens like the mountains and forests. A sudden increase in crows in a rural area often follows a radical increase in the timber wolf population. I highly doubt that’s the case in the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Sheriff?” Sellers asked. “You there?”

  “Yes. Sorry. Why would timber wolves increase the crow population?”

  “No one knows for sure, but the two species have always worked in tandem. The crow leading the wolf to prey, and the wolf leaving carrion for his feathered friend to eat later—like payment, although we know they aren’t so advanced in their thought patterns.”

  “Birdbrains.”

  “Exactly. Wolves are quite a bit smarter, of course, but I don’t think they have sufficient brainpower to account for a system of checks and balances. Of course there are quite a few Native American folktales that ascribe humanlike behavior to the beasts and the birds. I’m sure there has to be one somewhere that explains why the crow and the wolf are friends, although I haven’t found it yet.”

  The slowing pace of his voice revealed he planned on remedying that lack of knowledge ASAP.

  Too bad I couldn’t ask him if werewolves followed the buddy system with crows, unless I wanted to be branded a nut job. Luckily, I did have a resident expert.

  After thanking Sellers, I disconnected, considered calling Malachi Cartwright, and decided to walk over. That way I’d get to see Noah.

  “I’m taking a stroll around town and then stopping at the Cartwrights’.”

  Sharon Brendel, the dispatcher on duty, nodded.

  “You can raise me on the radio or my cell if you need to.”

  “How well do you know him?” Sharon asked dreamily.