Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega #4)(94)

“That’s when he met Maggie, right?” Max said. “Granddad says he was working at her ranch.”

Charles huffed a laugh. “Her ranch was two hundred acres of the nastiest country I’ve ever tried to run cows on. It had a spring, though, pure and clean and cold at high summer. We were at the nearest town … I don’t remember the name of it, though it might come to me. Joseph and I had just finished up the fall roundup and were flush with money and time, because we’d been let go like most of the other hands after the drive. She’d come into town driving a beat-up old truck to buy supplies and ran into trouble at the store.”

“Because she was Navajo—I mean, Diné?”

Charles shook his head. “Most of the people there were Navajo—Diné if you’d prefer. No. It was that she was a woman trying to be a man. That kind of attitude about women wasn’t very Navajo, really, but it was very 1950s. Anyway, Joseph and I stepped in. Joseph being Joseph, it wasn’t long before fists were flying, and Maggie was pretty good with her fists. She was smarter than the rest of us, though, because she hiked back to her truck and pulled out her shotgun. And that was the end of that fight. We worked for her all that winter.” He looked at Anna. “Not that winter in Arizona, except for the really high country, is very cold compared to Montana. I lit out that spring, but Joseph stayed and married her. I think she still owns that patch of ground, but they moved back here after a few years when Hosteen’s dedication to the Arabians started to pay off and he really needed more help.”

“Why a moose?” Anna asked. She’d seen a few moose since moving to Montana. Even the werewolves were wary of them.

“You’d have to be male, eighteen, and trying to impress a girl to understand,” said Charles.

Max laughed. “Sixteen works,” he said.

First Anna’s phone rang and then Charles’s.

“McDermit was a fetch,” said Leslie as soon as Anna answered the phone. “I’m looking at a pile of sticks sitting in the chair where he was sitting not ten minutes ago.”

Charles, his attention caught by Leslie’s conversation, answered his own phone, and though Anna could hear the voice on the other side, she couldn’t understand a word he said.

“English,” said Charles. “My Navajo was never that good and I’ve hardly spoken it for twenty years.”

“The fae,” said Joseph, “the fae can look like anyone. She’s here.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Anna told Leslie, and ended the call.

CHAPTER

14

Joseph Sani woke up feeling as though he were eighteen again. Nothing hurt. He sat up in his bed and wondered if he had died and this was what happened afterward. But his body looked like the body of an old man, and his breath was still too short.

He got up gingerly, expecting at any moment to feel as he had sitting trapped and helpless in the car. Aging, he knew, was part of living—a part of living that he’d chosen over the arguments of his father and his wife. That didn’t make the frustration of being dependent easier, he’d found.

But on his feet, his body was still obeying him as it had not in years. Not only didn’t it hurt, but he picked up a heavy potted plant that was set on the ground near the window; he had most of his old strength back.

There’s something you need to do, Charles had said, or words almost like that.

Joseph wasn’t a particularly spiritual man. Not like Charles, his brother-by-choice, and mostly he’d been grateful for that. Men who saw the spirits had to listen to them—though Charles only listened to them when he wanted to.

But even a man who wasn’t spiritual could tell that something was up when the wear and tear of eighty-odd years of life were lifted from him: it must be time for him to do that something. Too bad he had no idea what that was.

Still, a man who was doing something ought to do it with clothes on. And an old cowboy who ought to do something would do it with his boots on. So he pulled out a pair of new jeans … and set them aside for a faded and broken-in pair. He took out a good shirt, though, that snapped up the front like any shirt that belonged to a cowboy ought to. Cowboying was hard on the hands. Any cowboy who handled ropes for very long soon had knuckles that didn’t like fussing with tiny little buttons.

After a moment’s thought, he didn’t put on a hat. This didn’t feel like something a hat would help with. He took a good look at himself in the mirror in his bathroom.

“You are old,” he told his reflection. But he didn’t feel that way. Not at all. He tightened his right hand in a fist.

He could still see the crooked finger that he’d broken when that four-year-old stallion decided to get the old Indian off his back. He hadn’t stayed off and hadn’t realized his finger was broken until twenty minutes later, when the adrenaline had worn off.

That finger had hurt for ten years, but it didn’t hurt now.

He turned away from the mirror and met the bright blue eyes of a little red-haired boy.

“The fae can look like anyone,” the boy said. “He’s coming.”

“Who are you?” Joseph asked—but the boy, who had been standing in the doorway of the bathroom, was gone.

“Chindi,” said Joseph—though the boy hadn’t felt evil. Maybe he’d been imagining things. But he still was careful to twist around so he didn’t go through the space where the boy had stood as he walked through the doorway back into his bedroom.