Witch Dance (8 page)

“I won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“An’ Charles.
Don’t tell Charles. He’d laugh.”

Ten-year-old Charles probably would. He prided himself on being a man . . . just like his father.

“I won’t tell Charles.”

Brian wrapped his arms around her neck and gave her a kiss that left sand on her cheek.

“I love you best in all the world, Katie.”

“I love you too, Bee Boy.” It was the family pet name for Brian, a name he’d given himself when he was first learning to talk.

“Will you love me always, Katie?”

“Always.”

“And take care of me forever and ever?”

“Forever and ever and ever.”

He wiggled out of her lap and flew across the sand with his arms outstretched. “You can’t catch me,” he yelled, his joyous voice lifting on the wind.

A year later she’d broken her promise to Brian.

His forever lasted only six years.

Would nothing take the dreams away? Even wide awake she couldn’t escape them, couldn’t escape the guilt.

Kate pressed her hands against her face and felt tears. Angrily she wiped them away.

She was in Tribal Lands for a fresh start. She leaned her elbows on the windowsill, determined to see nothing except the trees and the mountains.

And that’s when she saw the horse and rider silhouetted against the moon. A man sat tall and majestic on a horse as black as the night.

“Eagle!”

His name ricocheted off the walls of her room, mocking her. She was so mesmerized by him that now she was seeing mirages. Rubbing her hands over her tired eyes, she glanced at the hillside once more. The horse and rider were gone.

She watched out the window awhile longer, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. Nothing moved, nothing marred the horizon. And yet . . . she was certain she’d seen them, the horse and rider so clearly outlined on the hillside.

Could it be an intruder come back to wreck the clinic once more?

“Over my dead body,” she muttered.

Moving quickly, Kate pulled on a pair of jogging shorts; then she raced through the house, her bare feet scarcely touching the smooth wooden floors.

She’d been a long distance runner in her high school and college days. During her years in medical school she’d often relieved the tedium and stress by racing on the nearest track.

On her way out the back door she grabbed the first weapon she could get her hands on, the string mop hanging on a nail, still damp from scrubbing the kitchen floor. The Lord only knew what she would do with the mop, but she wasn’t about to sit idly by while someone destroyed her work again.

Hiding wasn’t her style.

 o0o

Eagle saw her coming, her red hair as bright as a beacon. He’d expected the intruders, but he’d never expected Kate Malone, brandishing a mop.

She was as noisy as a freight train, roaring through the night with the mop held aloft. Fearless, she stormed through the clinic.

Eagle watched her, amused. She was in no danger, for he’d kept watch all night. The clinic was empty.

He knew the art of stillness. The years away from Witch Dance had not taken it from him, nor the ability to blend with the night, to be a part of it.

Kate passed so close, he could have reached out and touched her. Eagle stayed his hand. The touching would come. For now, watching was enough.

“Come out,” she said. “I know you’re in here.”

She poked the mop behind a stack of lumber and jabbed it into dark corners.

“Come out with your hands up and I might be generous.”

Leaning forward with the moon impossibly bright upon her hair and on the whiteness of her shirt, she shaded her eyes, trying to see into the darkness.

The wanting of her pierced him like arrows, and watching, he knew it would always be so. She was in his blood, and the mere sight of her stirred him beyond imagining.

He stepped from the shadows, so close his thigh touched hers. She spun around, dropping the mop, her mouth round with surprise. The knowledge of what they were to each other and what they would be sparked in their eyes.

“Be generous, Kate,” he said, reaching for her.

She hesitated only a moment, then, surrendering, she wrapped herself around him, her arms circling his shoulders, her hands woven in his hair, her left leg pressed against his groin and her right curved around his leg.

“Where have you been?” she whispered.

He cupped her face. “Waiting for this.”

Her sigh was as soft as prairie grasses bending before the wind.

Even before his lips touched hers he knew the honeyed taste of her, the warm, musky scent of her. It filled his nostrils and the pores of his skin. It raced through bone and sinew and blood, pounding with the insistent beat of war drums.

There was no need for words. Mouths joined, skin touching skin, they sank to their knees, weak and dying of the love-lust that consumed them. His hands were under her shirt, on her soft breasts, and hers massaged him through his well-worn jeans.

She made a soft, keening sound, like a wounded animal, and Eagle scooped her into his arms. He whistled once, twice. Out of the darkness came his black stallion. Kate was no burden to him as he mounted.

“I will not submit to these barbaric ways,” Kate said even as she wrapped her arms around his chest.

“Submissive women bore me,
Wictonaye
.” He bent close, his eyes challenging hers. Kate held his stare while night winds soughed softly about them. From far away came the cry of a coyote.

Still holding his gaze, Kate unlaced the leather thongs at the neck of his shirt, wet the tip of her finger with her tongue, then slowly traced his nipple.

“I will
never
submit,” she whispered.

Smiling, Eagle dug his heels into the stallion’s flanks.

Thundering across the prairie with the wind in her hair, Kate existed in a state of being beyond time and light and knowledge.

All she knew was the sound of hoofbeats on the hard prairie floor and the swaying motion of the horse that rocked her in Eagle’s arms.

 o0o

Hal waited until the house was quiet then climbed out the window. The minute his feet hit the ground he began to run. There was no need to look back. Nobody would pursue him. His father had been snoring like a downed buffalo when he left, and Deborah was out with one of her many boyfriends.

He’d be back long before she was, tucked safely in bed when she checked, as innocent as a newborn babe. Hal tipped back his head and laughed. A coyote in the hills answered him.

Hal wasn’t scared. Nothing scared him. He had the power of the wolf.

His feet were swift and sure as he ran. He could outrun anybody in the Chickasaw Nation. Someday he would be a famous runner, earning lots of money, so everybody in Witch Dance would look at him driving by in his red Corvette and say, “There goes the luckiest man alive” instead of “Poor Hal.”

He was sick of being Poor Hal, the boy whose mama got herself shot and whose daddy barely even knew he was alive.

Or maybe he’d prefer a black Corvette.

Wolf Man, he would call himself when he got famous. It would be a tribute to the great man who had shown him the future.

The Great One was waiting for him inside a small hut tucked in the foothills of the Arbuckle Mountains.

“You came.” The man sitting on the dirt floor of the hut with his legs crossed nodded wisely. “It is good.”

“Eagle is looking for you,” Hal said, sitting opposite him and imitating the older man’s posture.

“How long?”

“Four days now.”

“The others?”

“They keep silent.”

“Good. We will let the white medicine woman think peace has come to her clinic, then . . .” He made a slicing motion with his hands.

“I understand.”

In the dim lights of the hut, the older man looked like a god as he reached into his pouch.

“To reward you for destroying the witch woman’s work,” he said, handing Hal a tiny packet.

Hal’s palms dampened as he stuffed it into his pocket. He would save it for a time when he was alone in his room with no one to come and bother him.

“I have to go now.”

“You will remember?” The older man made the slicing motion with his hands once more.

“I will remember.”

He raced into the night, dreaming of fame and the kaleidoscopic journey he would take with the peyote.

 o0o

They came suddenly upon his campsite. A blanket woven of all the colors of the sea lay upon the ground beside blackened embers from a recent fire, and the whisper of the river sang through the valley.

Eagle dismounted, taking Kate with him, and when he spread her upon the sea-colored blanket, she knew she would remember the moment always, the song of the river and the brightness of his eyes as he undressed himself, then her. It was a slow unveiling, surprising considering the sexual frenzy that had brought them there.

Bending low, he touched her—touched her breasts, the soft down of her abdomen, the tiny indentation of her navel, the blue-veined skin inside her thighs. And all the while he chanted the strange beautiful words of his people.

He didn’t have to speak English for her to understand. Eagle was speaking the language of love.

Breathless, she watched him. Every inch of her skin trembled under his inspection.

Levering himself over her, he gazed deep into her eyes.

“Say you want me, Kate.”

“I want you, Eagle.”

“Say you want me as I want you.”

“I’m shameless. I would ride through an inferno to feel your arms around me. I would storm the very gates of hell to have you inside me, there” —she touched herself— “where I burn.”

“
Waka
ahina uno, iskunosi Wictonaye. Waka.
”

“Yes. Teach me, Eagle.” She cupped his face. “Teach me to fly.”

“Come.” Taking her by the hands, he lifted her up so that they were facing each other, kneeling. “In the ancient traditions of my people, there is a ceremony lovers use so that they may know each other.” He traced her lips with the tips of his fingers.

She closed her eyes, breathing in the dark, musky scent of him. Behind her, the mountains cast giant shadows while the river murmured its timeless song.

When Eagle withdrew his hands, she leaned toward him and raked the tips of her nails down his chest. “In the tradition of my people . . . we would long since have been joined together, panting on this blanket.”

“Patience,
Wictonaye
.” Smiling, he touched her breasts. “See what the waiting does.” Her nipples, already peaked, turned hard as diamonds in his skilled hands.

He withdrew his touch once more. She was almost screaming with need.

“I’ve never had patience.” She ran her hands over his chest. “If I had a weapon, I would take you at gunpoint.”

“Will this do?” He pulled a lethal-looking knife from his belt and held it toward her, hilt first, the blade gleaming in the moonlight.

She traced the flat side of the blade, shivering at the feel of the cold, deadly steel. Then, setting the knife aside, she scooted close to him, close enough so that their bodies touched from chest to knee. Lacing her arms around his neck, she bent down and slowly traced his lips with her tongue.

She felt the shiver run through him, then leaned back, smiling.

“So . . . mighty warrior. Teach me patience.”

“We will begin” —he took a deep shuddering breath, then reached for her right hand— “like this.” Slowly he laced their fingers together. His palm was warm and strong. “And then you will touch yourself” —he grazed her breasts with his fingertips— “like so, to indicate what you like.”

“And you?”

“I will do likewise.” He pressed his hand against the flat of his belly and ran it downward.  Breathless, she watched. “It is the mirror dance . . . an ancient and time-honored prelude to love.”

With her eyes holding his, she touched herself, touched herself in all the places she wanted his hands, his lips, his tongue. She imagined him sliding through her slick, satiny passages, imagined the hard, heavy feel of him, the blessed friction that would both soothe and excite. Her breath sawed through her lungs, and her head fell back on a neck too limp to support its weight.

Her right hand clenched, tightened, and Eagle felt the shudder that racked her. His blood roared in his ears. She was ready for him now, ready for the final dance that would send them flying to the skies.

He loosened his hold on her hand, and slid his fingers slowly up the length of her arm, across the path of moonlight that gleamed on her bare shoulder and over her tender, blue-veined throat.

“Fly with me,
Wictonaye
,”

“Yes . . . oh, yes,” she whispered, reaching for him.

She was a lily stretched upon his Indian blanket, a fallen flower offering her nectar to him. And he took it, took all of it, searing her with fingers and tongue until she was thrumming with need.

Humming low in her throat, a sound both musical and passionate, she rose from the blanket and bent over him. Her tongue made fire in his blood as her hair fell in a bright curtain across his belly.

And Eagle knew that her hair was the thing he would remember most about this night, her shining hair strewn across his dark skin like blood.

All the poetry in his soul spilled forth, and he whispered praises in the ancient tongue of his people, praises to her bright hair and her skin that was white as the wings of doves. Lowering her to the blanket, he covered her and together they soared.

Eagle and his
Wictonaye
.

Chapter 8

She was totally without shame, lying on the Indian blanket in broad daylight, tangled with her lover. A pale pinkish glow lay on the land as the sun peeked over the mountain. In the early morning light his skin glowed, smooth and earth-colored. She knew how every inch of it looked, felt, tasted.