The Renegades: Nick (8 page)

They all appeared to be greenhorns, by the way they were dressed. Nick nodded and waved for them to come on.

“Let’s get to it,” he shouted, as the newcomers rode within hearing distance. “Follow me.” He lifted the Shifter into a long lope again.

At the wagons on Peck’s claim, a small crowd was gathered. How many were Pecks, how many were other neighbors, Nickajack neither knew nor cared. All he wanted was for this fire to be conquered and the lot of them to be scattered to the winds.

Callie let go of him, slid to the ground before he could hand her down, and started helping Mrs. Peck untie the sacks on both his horses. He turned away from the glimpse of her from over his shoulder, her bright hair gleaming, her face so resolute that she looked curiously wise. Well, she had better be, damn it, or these people would die because she had brought the Goingsnake to lead them.

He slammed his mind against her again and sat his horse, feeling the wind. The flames were visible now on the horizon, leaning a little toward the west. They didn’t look to be sweeping straight to the north, where they could get his place and Callie’s.

But they could change direction in a heartbeat. They could blow straight east in the next minute and consume their bodies, and their claims wouldn’t matter, then.

“We’ve got three barrels of water here,” Mr. Peck shouted through the hubbub.

“Wet the sacks and blankets,” Nick shouted back.

He sent Callie a glance meaning that she should oversee that. She replied with a straight look and a short, solemn nod that told him she would, then set to the task.

Nick swept his gaze around at the waiting settlers.

“As the women wet the blankets, you men go pick one up.”

And then come with me. We’ve got to set a backfire, and now
.

The words wouldn’t come out of his mouth. He cleared his throat, but no voice would sound. What if the backfire turned on them?

Yet they had no other weapon. And three barrels of water was no more than a drop in the ocean.

His hands and feet wouldn’t move. The Shapeshifter danced restlessly beneath him, throwing up his head to whinny his protest at the smell of smoke, fighting his instinct to run from fire while he waited for direction from his rider.

Yet Nick sat there with the reins frozen in his fingers and the sweat running down his spine. The boy who had come to fetch him couldn’t be more than ten years old, yet he was lining up with the men for a wet towsack
to fight the fire. What if he didn’t live through it?

Everyone was doing exactly as he had said, obeying his instructions to the letter, each man looking to him as he picked up a wet blanket, waiting for the next words out of Nick’s mouth as if he were Moses on the Mount. He had to do something, or sit here and let them all burn to ashes for sure.

Or do something wrong and cause them all to burn to ashes.

His mind’s eye flashed to two sixteen-year-old boys’ bodies on the ground, their handsome young faces already buried in the soft green grass of the Nation, their backs dotted with trickles of blood flowing from the bulletholes. He could hear the sudden, deadly cracks of the shots.

He’d looked to the screen of trees where the assassins were hiding in ambush, knowing even as he did so that he’d never see their faces, never be sure of their names. They would not face justice; they would get away with taking two young lives for no other reason than that the boys rode with him.

Or that he’d been the target and they’d missed him.

Either way, he was helpless to save them, helpless to do anything that would make a dime’s worth of difference.

Something touched his leg. He jumped and
looked down to see Callie standing at his stirrup, her green eyes wide and deep.

“The wind’s shifting to come out of the east, don’t you think?” she said.

Still frozen, he sat and looked down at her.

Her skin had gone so pale that the freckles stood out across her nose, but not from fear. Her eyes blazed with hope and trust. In him.

“Nick, you can do this,” she said. “I’m sorry that you must, but you can.”

She believed it with all her heart.

He might as well believe it, too. He couldn’t very well turn and ride away, could he?

Wetting his finger, he lifted it into the wind.

“Pray it’ll hold,” he managed to say.

Then he tore his gaze from hers and swung around in the saddle. He looked out across the ragged bunch of neighbors he had never wanted, held his hand high, and shouted, “We’re setting a backfire! Men, follow my lead. Boys, form a line behind them. Women, keep every cloth wet.”

These were only Callie and Mrs. Peck and her little girl, but they could do the job. As if to prove it, Callie thrust a wet saddle blanket into his hands and ran back to the wagon that held the water.

He threw the blanket across his pommel and began pushing the Shapeshifter toward the flames. This fire
could
be turned: it was already moving west. The wind was all that gave their
pathetic little bunch any chance at all against the flames. It blew right out of the east, steady and straight, bending the edges of the fire even more toward the west. The men and boys followed him toward it, some running on foot because their mounts were too scared for them to manage.

Nick stood in his stirrups, looked up and down the fire line, judging it one last time, then pulled some lucifers from his pocket and jumped off the Shapeshifter’s back. Positioning the men and boys with gestures, handing out the few matches he had, he managed to open himself, body and soul, to the task at hand, the way he had always dealt with danger. No past, no future—only now and what had to be done filled his mind. For the first time since that day the boys died, they left him.

He scraped the head of one of the lucifers across the sole of his boot, bent and set the grass afire at his feet, his wet blanket ready in the other hand. Instantly, he had to use it, for the wind made a swirling shift. The others, watching, imitated him.

Somebody yelled a warning about the wind, and the frantic fight began. The stiff breeze grew stronger and helped them, then turned treacherous, then helpful again, then undecided, and the glimpses of arms lifted and lowered, the flash of orange flames, and the
black of the burned grass became all he could see. The noise of sacks slapping against the earth and fire crackling in the air filled his ears. His body raised up and bent down, his hands held the blanket, and his arms beat at the fire with no direction from him.

Someone thrust a wet blanket at him and he realized that the Peck boy was running back to the water barrel to exchange dry blankets for wet for the other men, also. Everyone was working as hard as he was—but everything they could do, might not be enough.

Callie’s face and her eyes full of trust appeared in his mind’s eye to squelch that thought. He couldn’t fail her. He would not.

In spite of their incessant beatings at the flames that tried to stray the wrong way, and his eternal vigilance at keeping track of where everyone was, a streak of fire raced toward the wagon and the women. Nick ran to beat it into submission, then glanced over his shoulder.

Callie didn’t see him; she was busy fighting to make the Pecks’ horses pull the wagon closer to the fire. Silently, he cursed his shortsightedness. He should’ve put one of the men on the wagon, someone with more brute strength, although no man was a match for the power of a horse.

His gut twisted with fear. Terrified horses had been known to run directly into a fire—sometimes to try to get to the barn where they
felt safe, sometimes from pure, blind panic. Callie would be helpless if this team bolted.

Someone yelled and he had to turn back to the fire. The next time he let himself look, she had wrestled the wagon into place and was holding the team relatively still while Mrs. Peck dipped the sack that her small son brought her. Callie stood up and braced her feet a little bit apart, watching the team, lifting her chin in that determined way she had that made him smile.

The wind shifted firmly to come from the east once more, stronger now. Nickajack breathed a little prayer of thanks and slapped at another tongue of fire trying to creep to the east.

What about her dead husband, Mr. Sloane? What kind of man had he been? Had he loved her well?

The smoke thickened and swirled in the wind, which was dancing a little, threatening to change direction again, but the main danger had finally passed. Their line of burned grass had widened enough that not many sparks blew across it anymore.

God
,
please don’t let the wind shift now
.

He put out another tendril of flames, then turned toward the wagon to rewet his blanket while the boy was busy with someone else. Callie waved him away, shaking her head, and
Mrs. Peck tipped the barrel to show it was empty.

Somebody yelled from behind him, and he turned to see that the wind was shifting again. It steadied, strengthened—and the fire completely gave in to it in that instant. The trouble spots all burned back into the strip of charred grass they had created, and then the main body of the fire raced away to the west. It ate up everything in its path, dipping a little to the south again, heading southwest straight toward the low wall of Comanche Butte, which offered only rocks for fuel.

It was over. They had won.

Nobody killed, nobody hurt.

Suddenly Nick found himself standing still for the first time in what seemed hours, but was more likely only half of one, surrounded by weary, smoke-blackened men who were shaking his hand and pounding his shoulders. Every one of them was smiling.

Their first big danger had been defeated. They had survived their first night and now their first day in the Cherokee Strip.

“Great work, Smith,” Peck said. “We appreciate your leadership more than you can know.”

The others joined him in a grateful chorus of thanks.

Leadership … just what he didn’t want. Now they were liable to be asking him for advice
on everything from dryland farming to varmint killing. They weren’t going anywhere, now. They would be here to stay.

“The wind was with us,” Nick said.

He turned away and strode across the crackling, dry grass, stamping out a spark here and there, searching through the lingering smoke to find Callie. She was standing to one side, shading her eyes with her hand, staring out at the retreating fire, every muscle in her body still tensed for the fight.

Then she spun around.

“Nick!”

Running toward him, smiling that blinding smile of hers, she made him want to run to meet her.

But that didn’t mean a thing. Nor did it mean anything that he had felt compelled to find her during and after the fire. Or that she had called up his courage when he couldn’t find it for himself.

Kissing her hadn’t been significant, either. He had done it out of relief that she hadn’t been trampled beneath that wild-eyed mare’s feet. That was all.

He had sworn a year ago never to trust another woman, never to even get entangled with one for more than a night. And he was going to keep that vow—come hell or high water, prairie fires or mountain girls.

He was going to leave Callie strictly alone.

After he got her back to her place.

After he returned her wheel and her damned horse.

He turned away and stalked toward the Shifter with a growl.

C
allie called to Nick again, and he stopped and waited for her to reach him, watching her with a little frown creasing his forehead. Surely he wasn’t angry with her for bringing him here, since everything had turned out so well!

“We did it,” she cried. “Oh, Nick, thanks for coming—you’ve saved all our stakes.”

Mr. Peck, hurrying toward them with two of the other men on his heels, chimed in before Nick could answer her.

“Yes, yes, we’re all grateful,” he said in his booming voice. “Mr. Smith, we’d like to invite you to come by our camp on your way home. Mrs. Peck was frying dried fruit pies when we
got the alarm, and we would take the greatest pleasure in sharing them with our neighbors.”

“Thank you for the offer of hospitality,” Nick said, and only then, when he turned to glance at Mr. Peck, did those fierce gray eyes let hers go. “But I must get back to my place at once.”

“So must we all,” Mr. Peck said, “but we’d like to treat you as thanks for your expert assistance.”

“No thanks needed—that’s what neighbors are for,” Nick said brusquely. Then he added, “You can return the help someday.”

He took Callie’s arm and turned toward the horses again.

“We’ll be glad to, but we hope it’s not help returned in kind,” Mr. Peck said, his tone positively jolly, now that the danger was past. “I think the people of Chikaskia Creek have fought enough fire.”

A cheer went up all around.

Nick looked back and lifted his hand in acknowledgment, but he kept on walking. Callie looked back, too, feeling every inch of his long, strong fingers through her sleeve as if they were touching her skin. Everyone’s eyes were on them.

“I don’t mean to be dragging you away. Are you wanting to go to the fried pie social?” he demanded gruffly.

To her amazement, she realized that she had
no desire to stop by the Pecks’ camp without Nick.

“No,” she said, “and that’s good, because you’re furnishing my mount.”

He shot her an annoyed glance.

“Somebody else can take you back to your claim.”

In direct opposition to the words, his grip on her tightened.

“Or I could return Fast Girl to you later,” she said lightly.

He gave her that look again, as if to judge whether or not she meant the remark seriously.

She looked at him with an innocent face.

“I ride her well enough to be on my own with her, don’t you think?”

She saw the brief struggle between bald truth and thin tact in his eyes.

“Not well enough. To strike out alone, I mean. With the smell of smoke and all this fire excitement in the air.”

Callie laughed.

“Come on, Nick, don’t worry about my feelings. Tell me what you really think.”

His jaw tightened.

“You’ve got to learn to ride if you aim to survive in this country,” he said. “I’ve already told you that.”

He sounded thoroughly irritated, which aggravated her no end.

“I do aim to survive out here,” she snapped. “Count on it. And I will learn to ride, but so far I’ve only been here a day and a night and they’ve been pretty busy.”

That made him smile. She tried, but she couldn’t resist smiling, too.

“Besides,” she said lightly, “Judy’s the only horse I have, and I’m not sure she’s the one for me.”

His grin broadened as he slowed down to avoid startling the little group of horses who were alternately grazing and lifting their heads to look toward the now-vanished fire.

“You ought to trade her off to one of your neighbors,” he drawled with a chuckle in his voice.

“But then I’d never get the Chikaskia school,” she said, grinning back at him. “I’d have an enemy for life and the beginnings of a feud.”

He laughed.

“Better saddle ol’ Joe the mule, then.”

Gathering the reins of both his horses, he led them away from the others and crossed Fast Girl’s reins on her neck. He went to her side and held his hands for Callie to step into.

She steadied herself by holding onto his shoulder. It was broad and hard and strong as steel, and in spite of the ashes covering his shirt and the sweat soaking it, a powerful urge came over her to caress those muscles, to explore
them with her fingertips and memorize them with her palm.

He lifted her as easily as if she weighed nothing at all. She managed her tangled skirts enough to throw her right leg over. Too soon, she had to let go of him as he set her onto the filly and stepped back.

“Nick,” she said, as she settled into the saddle and he began shortening the stirrups to fit her, “will you teach me to ride?”

He glanced up at her quickly, then went back to his work.

“Callie,” he drawled, “do you reckon that’d be such a good idea?”

She hesitated, but not because she was uncertain of his meaning. His tone was unmistakably sensual. He looked up again with those heart-stopping eyes, and they held her still and breathless.

So he felt it, too, this unreasoning desire that came over her sometimes when she was with him—this desire she must keep under control at all costs. Hadn’t giving in to Vance destroyed her whole life?

No. It isn’t a good idea. Spending time with you will make me want to kiss you again. It will make me want much more than that, I can already tell
.

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t give me lessons,” she said. “You’re a wonderful rider and you have lots of horses for me to practice on.”

“Aha,” he said, walking around the mare to
adjust the other stirrup. “So you think you can work up a horsetrade with
me
. Remember, now, I’ve seen Judy at her worst.”

That made Callie laugh again.

“Ill come up with something for boot,” she said, watching his every move as he finished with the stirrup, then went to the Shapeshifter and mounted in one long, flowing motion full of masculine grace.

“If you trade with me, you’ll have to offer something mighty fine,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade you Judy straight across for any animal on my place, including the old coyote who comes around in the Cold Month looking for handouts.”

“What an insult!” she said, loving the boyish, mischievous expression that fell across his face as he entered so readily into the game. “Poor Judy. She’d be hurt if she heard you say that.”

“No, she wouldn’t. Judy doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her. She shows you that every time you look at her.”

When they started riding out, everyone waved and called to them. Nick returned the good-byes politely but briefly, never slowing the Shifter’s pace.

“Come by to see us any time,” Mr. Peck called. “If you need to, water your horses at our place before you start home.”

“Much obliged,” Nick called back, and lifted the Shifter into a short lope.

“You surely are leaving in a hurry for someone who told Mr. Peck what neighbors are for,” Callie teased him.

He shot her such a fierce look that she laughed out loud. His scowl grew worse and she wished she hadn’t. Evidently, he wasn’t in quite such a good mood as she’d thought.

“I was talking about neighbors and trouble,” he growled, “and I’ve had enough of both today to last me ‘til spring.”

He looked at her as accusingly as if she were the cause of the fire, as well as of his seeing his neighbors. Callie’s temper flashed.

“You ought to thank me for bringing you down here,” she said sharply. “If I hadn’t, your cabin might be burning to ground along about now.”

He ignored that.

“Don’t be trying to pull me into any pie socials or box suppers or all-night shindigs,” he warned.

How much gall could he have! As if she’d set her cap for him and then kidnapped him to go to the fire!

“Don’t worry,” she shot back. “I wouldn’t go walking out with an old grouch like you! Not even to so much as a … a hog killing!”

He glared at her. She glared at him.

“
Now
who’s bringing up the subject of hogs?” he said.

Callie stared him right in the eye and tried not to smile, tried not to let go of her anger, so the mysterious charm he held for her couldn’t take hold. Her valiant efforts didn’t do one whit of good. Nick’s frown deepened, but the corners of his mouth turned up in spite of him, and all she wanted to do was laugh and reach out to touch him, to trace the shape of his sensual lips with her fingertip.

“I’m not bringing it up as a topic of conversation,” she said, managing somehow to speak sharply. “I’m only using it as a figure of speech. It means I wouldn’t go anywhere with you.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire
.

Mischief flashed in his eyes, paler and more mesmerizing than ever in the sooty rims that had formed around them in the sweat on his face.

“I know one place you’ll go with me,” he said.

“Where?”

“To running water. To a place where you can stand in the deep shade under cool running water and wash the ashes off your skin.”

He looked her up and down, slowing his horse a little. Hers slowed, too, of course.

“How does that sound, Callie Sloane? Wouldn’t it feel good to wash away that layer
of grit and ash sticking to you all over, gluing you to your clothes, itching and stinging you and making you feel hotter than a poker in the fire?”

His low voice moved her like the touch of his hand.

“It sounds like you ought to get a job selling snake oil,” she said. “I don’t believe there’s a place like that within five hundred miles of here.”

He smiled a slow smile.

“There’s your trouble,” he drawled. “Lack of faith. I’ll take you there straight as the crow flies.”

She raised her eyebrows and fixed him with her schoolteacher stare.

“Did I say I wanted to go there?”

“I saw it in your eyes,” he said, and kissed to the Shapeshifter, who went into a ground-eating long trot.

Her horse followed, of course. Callie probably couldn’t have turned her if she’d tried.

Finally they rode out of the lingering haze created by smoke and dust to see Callie’s wagon off in the distance, listing to one side, looking like a great white cloud fallen from the sky and stuck to the land. It seemed like a miracle to Callie, when she remembered how afraid she had been that it and everything in it would vanish in the fire.

Nick didn’t even glance at it—he turned in
at the mouth of his treed canyon. Fast Girl stayed with the Shapeshifter.

“You’re bluffing,” Callie called. “Admit it, Nick, and take me home.”

But I don’t want to go home. I want to go with you
.

“Nope. You as much as called me a liar. I have to prove I’m not.”

They sounded like two little kids, and she felt like one. The fire danger had passed, Nick was her companion, and she had something to look forward to.

“Are you planning to conjure up a waterfall?” she teased. “Oh, I know! You’ll pour a bucket of water over my head.”

“Wrong and wrong.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“And ought to be a poker player,” he said, mimicking her voice. “Snake oil salesman, poker player. Which is it?”

“I’ll have to see your running stream of cool water before I can tell you,” she said. “Maybe I’ll say you should witch water for a living.”

“I haven’t even got a peach tree to give me a forked branch to witch with,” he said. “There’s no magic to it.”

“Hmmf,” she said skeptically. “There will be if we stand under a shady, flowing stream that’s cool in this parched country today.”

“We will,” he promised.

They trotted slowly alongside the rocky
creekbed with an easy silence between them. They passed the low-water pond and the treed pasture where Nick had some horses, then rode up the slope into his front yard, and across it to the barn.

“It seems a hundred years ago that we ran out through that doorway with the sacks tied onto our saddles,” Callie said. She stood in one stirrup, held onto the horn while she kicked free of it, and half tumbled, half slid to the ground from Fast Girl’s back. “Doesn’t it?”

Nick had already dismounted and was coming back to help her. He was too late.

“At least you’ve learned to dismount,” he said. “We can skip at least one of your riding lessons.”

“Only after I’ve had a little more practice,” she said, “or grown longer legs. I could break my neck if I don’t do better than I did just now.”

“Have you ever thought about a mounting block?”

His voice was dry and teasing.

“Thanks so much for the useful suggestion,” she retorted in the same tone. “I’ll just carry one around on the back of my horse, and if I need to get down and fight a fire or go into a store in town or anything, I can lower it on a rope.”

He laughed. “Think about it. It might slow
Judy down if she had to carry the extra weight.”

Callie grinned at him, suddenly feeling very close to him again.

“You’re just trying to think of reasons for me to keep Judy,” she said. “You’re scared you’re going to end up as her next proud owner.”

“It’ll never happen,” he said, looking down at her with that slow smile she loved. “I’d have to be dead drunk, or she’d have to be the last piece of horseflesh in the Strip.”

“I wish I had a barrel of Uncle Jasper’s white lightning,” she said.

“It would do you no good,” he drawled. “I’m foolish, but not foolish enough to let any woman, much less you, fill me full of liquor.”

He grinned at her, then turned to start unfastening the cinch on his mount.

“Wait in the shade,” he said. “I’ll take care of the horses.”

“I’ll help. That’ll get us into the water that much quicker.”

“Aha,” he said. “You still don’t believe there really is any cool water.”

“I’ll believe it when I feel it running over my skin.”

“Go ahead,” he said, over his shoulder, “the water’s here. Start taking off your clothes.”

“Nick!” she squealed in surprise.

Then she imitated his voice.

“I’m foolish, but not foolish enough to take off my clothes in front of any man, much less you.”

He laughed.

“Well, at least we know we don’t trust each other.”

“Except with our lives in a prairie fire.”

He turned, his head cocked to one side to study her. They exchanged a long, straight look.