The Barefoot Bride (52 page)

Sterling sat there for many moments before he reached for his knife and cut the umbilical cord. Since he'd had to leave most of his belongings in the settlement he'd just left, he had nothing at all that could be considered a swaddling cloth, and his saddle blanket was filthy. His shirt would have to do. He took it off and wrapped the baby in it. Gently, he laid her on a soft bed of leaves and set to work digging her mother's grave.

When the woman was buried, he remembered hearing Father Tom say once that the Apaches were a religious people. Sterling didn't know who their god was, but far be it from him to deprive this courageous woman of some holy words at her funeral. He tried to recall the Lord's Prayer.

"Our Father, Who are allowed in heaven, Howard be Thy name..." He shuffled his feet in the dirt, ashamed he couldn't remember any more than that and cursing the fact that he'd rarely paid attention in his religion classes at the orphanage.

He decided to try once more. "Our Father, Howard be Thy name. Thy will is against all temptations. Give us some bread when You lead us to deliver trespasses in Thy kingdom... on earth as it is in heaven. Amen."

He raised his eyes to that special place in the sky and asked the Almighty to forgive him for botching the prayer. Sure that God complied, his guilt disappeared.

But the Indian baby did not. She was howling like a coyote, and Sterling had no earthly idea what he was supposed to do with her.

But he
did
know Cochise would be looking for the mother.

Hell, for that matter, she could have been the chief's wife... or worse, his
daughter.
Taking into account his past troubles with fathers, Sterling was almost certain the dead woman really was the fearsome chief's daughter. And it was more than likely that the whole tribe of Chiricahua Apache warriors was tracking her down. If they found him with the baby, there was very little chance they'd wait patiently for him to explain the truth of the matter. They'd find the freshly dug grave, dig it up for proof, see the woman's fatal wound, and make a human sieve of him.

He had to get out of here fast. There wasn't anything or anyone in the world who could escape Cochise and his warriors. Gathering the shrieking infant in his arms, he mounted awkwardly and urged Gus into a full gallop.

As he leaned over the saddle, the infant girl tucked securely in the crook of his arm, he was more convinced than ever that females were nothing but trouble.

*

"Spirits hither... spirits thither," Chimera whispered in her spookiest manner. "Find my hero and bring him—bring him... yither? Zither?"

Her raven hair covered by an equally black hat, she stirred the potion slowly, her fingers turning white around the stick, and hoped fervently that her invented incantation would work as well as the one that had been obliterated from her ancient book of witchcraft. Everything depended on this spell.

She needed a man—the one about whom she'd fantasized for so long—and the time had come to release her knight from fantasy and bring him to reality. The spell that would bring about that transformation
had
to work.

"It made sense, and it rhymed," she reassured herself as she leaned over the pot and watched the liquid bubble. Rising steam heated and moistened her cheeks; sweat beads dotted her forehead. She tried to wipe them off before they dripped into the boiling brew in the huge black caldron, but a few drops splashed into it. The recipe didn't call for salt, but there was little she could do about it now.

"Wonderful," she muttered, and threw her hat to the cabin floor. "The most important potion I've ever attempted and I have to go and sweat in it!"

"I brought you the biggest grub I could find," a young boy said as he hobbled into the cabin and placed a squirming object in her palm. "But I still don't understand how a cooked grub will conjure up your knight. Besides that, you need more than one man. Maybe if you multiplied all the ingredients you could get an army. Everett Sprague won't be intimidated by only one—"

"He won't be a plain, ordinary man, Archibald. The one I get will be a mighty champion! A true hero!" Chimera informed him confidently, and looked down at the wriggling thing in her hand. Pity coursed through her. Why couldn't witches make brews without having to kill things? Her eyes slid from the grub to the boiling mixture she was still stirring with her other hand. Would the grub die instantly, or would it suffer first?

It was such a healthy grub. Fat, moist, and still covered with bits of Arizona Territory. She examined it more closely and could have sworn she saw tiny grub tears on its tiny grub face. "Couldn't you have found a grub already on its last legs, Archibald? Killing one like that would be like putting it out of its misery."

He grinned at her and pushed a lock of his yellow hair out of his eyes. "I don't know what a sick grub looks like. They all look the same to me. Want me to ask Snig, Snag, and Snug to find you a dying one?"

Snig, Snag, and Snug. The freckle-faced, redheaded triplets had been missing all morning. "Those devils would think digging up grubs was too boring a job," she said. "Now if I asked them to bring me a basket full of live rattlesnakes..."

Archibald laughed and limped over to his small cot, where his medical books still lay open. Chimera watched him, her heart constricting as it always did when she concentrated on his misshapen leg. Poor boy. No one wanted him. No one wanted any of them.

Misfits. That's what everyone called them. They were considered dangerous, or crazy, or both. Most folks, or at least the ones who'd been brave enough to stay here since Cochise had taken to the warpath, took great care to avoid them. No, Chimera thought with a sigh, she'd get no help from anyone but the knight the spirits would send.

She had to make this spell work. If it failed... if the man of her fantasies didn't come... What on earth would happen to them all? She looked at the grub again and saw its tiny grub arms outstretched in a pleading gesture for mercy. Her heart turned over in her breast. "'No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.'" Out of the corner of her eye, she looked at Archibald and waited for him to remember the quote.

Archibald thought for a moment, his blue eyes bright with concentration. "Shakespeare. The line is from
Richard III,
right?"

She smiled with pride. "Yes, and I will not be a beast without pity." She took the grub outside, the loose board on the porch groaning as she stepped on it. After digging a small hole in the ground that was kept cool by the sagging porch roof, she dropped the grub inside and covered it completely.

"Well, so much for my potion. Without a grub it won't work. Without a potion, there can be no spell, and without a spell... there will be no man." Sitting down, she watched the clouds move by overhead. She tried to read her future in the patterns they made, but she saw nothing except a shape that looked like a nose with wide nostrils.

She sighed. She'd never been good at reading the future. Tea leaves at the bottom of cups were nothing but brown mush to her, her crystal ball was only a round and empty piece of glass, and her tarot cards were merely cards with pretty pictures on them.

But she didn't need fortune-telling devices to know that if she didn't find a way to get a hero, hers and the boys' futures were doomed. Somehow, and from somewhere, the knight just had to come.

"Chimera!"

Snig's piercing yell as he emerged from the woods surrounding the rickety cabin snapped her out of her concentration. "Snig! What have you been torturing with that thing?" She pointed to the long, jagged stick he was holding. "Did you find that spider dung I sent you and your brothers after?"

"We don't know what the hell spider shit looks like!" Snig shouted, his freckled face flushed with exertion. "But your trap—" He ran to her and pulled her along as he raced back into the forest. "Hurry, Chimera!"

She gasped. Her werewolf trap! "I got a werewolf?" she cried, and then stopped abruptly. "Have you been torturing a werewolf?"

Snig stomped the ground. "It ain't no werewolf! What you bagged is a man!" He turned and ran, knowing she would follow.

A man? Chimera repeated to herself. Her breath quickened. The spell! But how could the potion have worked? She hadn't even completed the whole incantation over it, and what about the missing grub and spider dung?

She tapped her lips with her fingers. Could it be that the grub and spider dung weren't such important ingredients after all? Had she really and truly conjured up a man? But what kind of man would let himself get caught in a werewolf snare? Certainly not a daring and courageous knight!

Her heart spiraled into the depths of her stomach. Because the spell had been only partly completed, it had only partly worked, she surmised. She'd gotten a man all right, but instead of the cunning hero she'd hoped for, she'd gotten a dolt!

"Chimera!" Snig shouted.

"Coming." Speeding along, she wondered just how stupid the man would be.

*

Sterling realized he looked stupid, but not as stupid as he felt. He was hanging upside down from a large tree branch, a rope firmly wrapped around his left ankle. And he was madder than hell. He was still shirtless, his chest and back pricked and scratched to the point of bleeding.

Two buck-toothed terrors stood guard over him, taking great delight in poking him with their stick swords. "Take that, you trespasser!" The boy jabbed at Sterling's shoulder.

"Dammit, you little monster!" Sterling tried to swing away from the stick and cursed the fact he'd left his knife in his saddlebag. If he had it, he could cut himself down and escape these juvenile desperadoes. And whistling for Gus was useless. The horse wouldn't respond until the terrors were gone.

"Don't you cuss at my brother!" Another of the boys lunged, the point of his stick leaving a red welt across Sterling's midriff. The boy then ran to him and, twisting Sterling's head, proceeded to whirl him around.

Spinning as fast as he was, Sterling was unable to grab his small torturer. "I'm going to do more than cuss at him when I get down!" he bellowed, still twirling in the air. "I'm going to—"

"Snug!" a woman yelled. "Stop that at once!" When the boy reluctantly obeyed, she ran to Sterling and stopped his spiraling. "What are you doing in my werewolf trap?"

"Werewolf—" Sterling frowned. Was the woman daft? Swiftly, he decided it would be best to humor her. She could be dangerous. "It appears I'm hanging from it. And now that we've established that and the fact that I'm not a...
werewolf,
will you please get me down?"

Chimera took a few steps away and examined him for a moment. He certainly wasn't what she'd expected, but dumb or not, he was all she had. "That depends," she said, her hands planted on her hips. "Do you know why you're here?"

Sterling realized his fate was completely in her hands and bit back his ire at her baffling question. Sarcasm rose in anger's place. "I suppose I came here for the express purpose of being able to experience the delight of hanging upside down from a tree. One hasn't lived until one has known what it feels like to have one's head about to explode with every drop of one's blood, one's leg completely numb, and one's flesh stabbed at by your three devils."

So he didn't know why he was here, she mused. He was
supposed
to know. "They aren't really my devils. Well, they are, but they aren't. You see, nine years ago—"

"Ma'am," Sterling said, his head truly throbbing now, "I'm sure the story of these junior criminals and who they belong to is an interesting one, but I think I'd enjoy hearing it more if I were on my feet instead of hanging in thin air."

She lifted her ragged crimson skirt, reached down to her boot, and withdrew a sharp knife. When Sterling saw the glittering blade, he tried to swallow, but suspended upside down like he was, he couldn't manage to get his throat to work. He could only hope she would slide the dagger through the rope and not across his neck.

Dammit, why had he stopped here? First Martha, then the posse, then the Apache woman and her baby, then three pygmy punishers, and now a lunatic who believed in werewolves. All in the space of a day!

"Chimera, look!" shouted Snag. "A baby!"

Chimera cast the knife aside and hurried to the infant, scooping her up from the bed of soft leaves Sterling had made when he'd stopped to stretch his stiff limbs. "Oh, what a darling little thing!" she exclaimed, and smoothed the baby's black hair.

"That's
my
baby!" Sterling hollered from his tree branch. "I mean... well, she's not really
mine."

Chimera looked up from the baby and smiled at him. "It looks like we both have children who aren't really ours."

Her warm, bright smile arrested his attention. Despite his irritation and pulsating head, he studied her more intently. He'd never seen a woman with hair as long as hers. Cascading in waves that looked like black liquid, it poured almost to her knees. And whiskey... her slightly slanted eyes were the hue of good whiskey and just as intoxicating.

"Intoxicating?" He mouthed the word and tore his gaze from her. In the absurd predicament he was in, what the hell was he doing, letting himself get carried away by this bit of female fluff?
Tucson.
He had to remember Tucson and his vow not to let anything or anyone delay his trip. "Put my baby down and release me from this trap!"

"Chimera don't take orders from you!" Snug shouted, and gave Sterling's chest another long scratch with the stick. "And you ain't in no position to give none nohow!"

"Snug, that's enough!" Chimera placed the baby back in the brush, retrieved her knife, and approached the man in the tree. She looked up at his rope-bound ankle. "I can't reach your foot. You'll have to cut yourself down. And be quick about it. As Virgil wrote, 'Time is flying, never to return.' Actually I prefer the Greek poets to the Romans, but I do read other works, you know."

Sterling frowned at both her balderdash and her patronizing manner. "No, I didn't know that, but how gracious you are to enlighten me. Now let me ask you this—just what the hell does Virgil have to do with—"