Hotter Than Hell (21 page)

“I don’t know, brother,” Jermaine said nervously. “Some of us left a lot of DNA evidence back there.”

“Ballistics won’t match up unless we go back through and act it out,” Lou said, glancing around and wiping his palms down his face. “For bigwigs that important, they’ll raze the forest looking for a trail.”

“I know, but what else can we say?” Dutch said, raking his finger through his hair.

“They didn’t kill nobody, didn’t ransom them like they could have,” Jesse said, glancing around the group, “and seriously made up for the inconvenience, if you ask me.”

“That’s the thing, dude,” Lou fussed under his breath, “nobody’s gonna ask you what
you think.
You’d better get this story tight and right, or all our asses are gonna spend a very long time in the brink.”

“Damned straight,” Vincent said. He looked around. “We go back to the original glen, anything we say we’re gonna do, we do. If we say we blew it up—we gotta blow it up. If we say we sprayed an area—we gotta spray the area. If…” his voice trailed off as he watched a goddess walk toward him.

Artemis sauntered over to the group and the small circle of men opened to allow her in. She touched Vincent’s face with trembling fingers and then lifted up to take his mouth. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’m a goddess…it will all work out. Men will see what they need to, the hostages will remember what they should, and you will each be honored for your courage.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off hers, wondering if this very insane woman really did have something supernatural about her. He wanted to tell her he was going to miss her, one very long afternoon with her wasn’t enough. But with his men standing there, each with the same expression on their faces as they stared at their temporary captors, he couldn’t. Contact with her after this would have vast repercussions.

Her sad gaze told him that she understood as she touched his face one last time. “Goodbye, gentle Titan…if you ever want to see me, visit my temple in Crete and call me by name…or simply go to your Olympus and find a meadow beneath the crescent moon…and whisper my name. I will come to you there.”

His ranks splintered, the men in his squad walked over to the respective nymphs trying to get their names, the method to contact them, and all pandemonium broke loose. Artemis shook her head and smiled with a quiet chuckle. Vincent raked his fingers through his locks, hoping all would be well. Then he watched sadly as Artemis began running, her long tresses sweeping her back, and her nymphs waving goodbye.

Somehow going into a tent to collect bound and gagged old men with tears running down their faces seemed completely anticlimactic. But as the squad opened the tents, they backed away in pure horror leaving the flaps flung up. Each tent was tiny, the size it appeared on the outside. What happened to the sumptuous love dens? Where were the bound and gagged hostages they’d been shown?

A buck was bound and gagged in each tent now. The animals had congealed blood on their coats exactly where the original mortal injuries had been. Glassy, dead, animal eyes stared at Vincent and his men. The poor creatures had been dead so long that rigor mortis had set in and each animal was washboard stiff.

“Oh, shit—we got played, partner,” Donovan whispered.

A cold sweat made Vincent’s t-shirt cling to him. The twitching of one deer freaked everybody out.

“What the fuck do we do now?” Jermaine yelled, beginning to walk in a circle.

Then another deer twitched, and still another, until the fragile nervous systems around Vince snapped, frayed, and popped, and guns got drawn toward the carcasses.

“No!” Vince shouted, not sure why. “Don’t screw with any more evidence. Leave it. Let’s put our heads together, we have to think through this, pick up the trail, we gotta…”

His voice trailed off as a human cough riveted everyone’s attention to one of the tents. A pudgy CEO lay naked, shivering, and bound by vines, leaves stuffed in his mouth. Terror-stricken, they watched each dead animal reanimate and then transform into a hostage. Jesse and Dutch stared at each other, voices choked.

“We weren’t drugged,” Jesse whispered.

“It happened.” Dutch wheezed, grappling at his chest as though having a heart attack, and then stumbled away and puked.

Nervous glances passed around the squad.

“Gotta still be the crap that’s in our systems,” Lou said, his voice quavering.

Vincent looked at the tents and then out into the vast wilderness, knowing. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s all it is.”

ARTEMIS KEPT HER WORD. THINGS WORKED OUT,
more than he could have imagined. Since the glen, every man on the squad retired. Donovan got a boat as an unspoken and untold gesture of appreciation from the CEO he helped half carry to the rendezvous point. He headed down to the Caribbean and disappeared. Last anyone heard, Donovan regularly had three gorgeous, out-of-this world babes on his yacht.

Jermaine went back to Brooklyn, and then moved to Harlem to buy a brownstone in the up-and-coming section…the squad quietly heard tell that some appreciation dollars fell off the table. Now Jermaine is tracing his family genealogy after a nymph mentioned something about him being a dead-ringer for an ancient king. Jesse went to Wyoming, and somehow some cattle land got ceded to him, mysteriously enough, along with a hundred head of healthy beef. He’s a happy man who only takes a harmonica into the woods these days. His hunting days are over.

Dutch was traveling abroad, last anyone heard, and getting VIP treatment wherever he goes—no expense spared—all financed from a nice, quiet Swiss account. Lou moved to southern California, joined Greenpeace, and became a New Age guru. Some say that a nice investment portfolio that changed hands as a private thank you allows him to pursue his environmental platform with gusto.

Major Harcourt still knows something about the whole story wasn’t right. There were no hallucinogens found in anyone’s systems, but all insisted on such bizarre occurrences that mind control or a new, experimental substance that leaves no trace could be the culprit. He is still searching for that drug or method of group hypnosis.

That day in the glen changed each and every man—both those who were captives and those who were hostages. Vince…well…he went back on home to Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula and is using his quiet, unspoken gift from the appreciative wealthy to help build up the town and rebuild the traditions of his people…preserving, especially, the culture and the oral stories called by some legends and myths.

He spends a lot of his days contemplating the universe and the wisdom of the ancestors as he burns incense and waits for the crescent moon in a quiet glen…from where he sits he can see across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island. The equinox is their anniversary. She comes so swiftly that he doesn’t mind waiting to be hunted, knowing soon he’ll be felled by a true goddess.

He loves her, plain and simple. She finally learned his name and has visited his people, unbeknownst to them what she really is. She still thinks he’s a Titan, and cannot believe him to be a mere mortal…because she hasn’t been so adored since the times of old, and never, ever, quite so personally.

WHEN SHE WAS THIRTEEN, SHE DREAMED OF
horses.

Most of the girls her age were horse-mad, and Catalina was no exception. That alone would have explained the dreams. But Abuelita, after whom she’d been named, had different ideas.

“It is a sign,” Grandmother had told her. “The women of my line have often been blessed with such omens. You must not forget this, but watch for its tokens in the future.”

Mom had laughed; she’d grown up with Abuelita’s stories, but she had never believed. And Dad had merely rolled his eyes. The Irish, he said, had the same kinds of superstitions. None of it was real.

Catalina believed. She saw the black horse when she slept, his glossy neck arched, his eyes shining with invitation. But she never got close enough to climb up on his broad, powerful back. He ran, and though she chased him she never caught him.

In time she almost forgot about the dreams. There was no room for real horses in Bel Air. Catalina went to law school just as Dad wanted. She married an attorney from the top law firm in Los Angeles, a man of ambition and little imagination. Life was busy and successful and very ordinary until she began having the dreams again.

Then it all fell apart.

Catalina O’Roarke, formerly Mrs. Neal Kirkland, Jr., jumped out of the battered Chevy truck, her new boots raising little puffs from the dusty ground. The ranch house was small and rustic, surrounded by empty corrals and a few scrawny cottonwoods. The prairie stretched all the way to the foot of the mountains; the countryside seemed almost desolate, mile upon mile of nothing but sage, chamisa, and open sky.

It was exactly what she wanted.

“Can I do anything else for you, miss?” the aging cowboy asked.

Cat managed a smile. “I’ll be fine, thanks.”

“Then I’ll be headed back to Taos. Turk and Pilar will look after you right and proper.”

He got back into his truck and drove away on the rutted track that passed for a road. Cat picked up her bags and walked to the porch. The boards creaked under her feet. The smell of cooking beans wafted out one of the windows.

She closed her eyes and let the tension drain from her shoulders. “It doesn’t look like much,” Heather had said, “but the place always seems to help me get my head on straight when I can’t take L.A. one minute longer. Just give it a chance.”

Give it a chance. She didn’t have anything to lose.

With a rueful shrug, Cat stepped through the door.

Turk adjusted the buckle under the saddle’s fender and stepped back. “That’ll do ya,” he said. “Perfect fit. And you don’t have to worry about ol’ Kelpie here…he’s the gentlest horse we got. He’s Miss Heather’s favorite.”

Cat shifted in the saddle, already anticipating the sore muscles to come. Seventeen years ago she would have given anything to be where she was now: mounted on a handsome buckskin with the prospect of a long, solitary ride ahead of her.

But she wasn’t thirteen anymore. If she’d had any sense, she would have admitted to Turk that she hadn’t been on a horse in well over a decade. But she didn’t want to admit weakness to any man, even one as inoffensive as Turk. She wanted to be left alone, even if it meant taking a few small risks.

God knew she’d almost forgotten what it was like to take a chance on anything outside the courtroom.

“Like I told you, Mrs. Kirkland—”

“Cat. Call me Cat.”

Turk cleared his throat. “Cat. Like I told you, just stick close to the river gorge and you can’t get lost. Kelpie knows his way home even in the dark.” He scratched his chin. “Still think you ought to take someone along…”

“I’ll be back by nightfall.” Cat pulled on the reins, turning Kelpie toward the barn door. “Please tell Pilar not to wait dinner for me.”

Turk touched one grizzled hand to the brim of his hat, a faintly worried look on his leathery face. Cat pretended not to see.

She started out along the rutted road and then cut across the plain. The sense of vastness she’d felt when she’d first arrived redoubled. The sky was a landscape in itself. She knew the Rio Grande gorge was nearby, winding its way south from Colorado until it became the broad brown river that bordered Mexico and Texas, but there seemed to be hardly any other landmarks except for the Sangre de Cristo mountains rising sharply from the prairie like skyscrapers built of earth and stone.

For most of the day she let Kelpie wander at will, basking in the late summer sun that warmed her face and shoulders. She stopped for lunch in the shade of an abandoned cabin, listening to the wind rattling in the rabbit-brush while she ate her sandwich. A hawk circled in the sky, but aside from him she was completely alone.

She was glad. A good dose of solitude, even loneliness, was just the cure for what ailed her. No more of Neal’s hypocritical lies. No more strict and unvarying routines. Just a sense of freedom she hadn’t felt since childhood.

By late afternoon she was ready to return to the ranch. Kelpie, looking forward to his ration of hay, broke into a trot as soon as she reined him south. Neither he nor Cat noticed the prairie dog town until his hoof plunged down into an unexpected hole.

He staggered. Cat lurched in the saddle and grabbed at Kelpie’s coarse mane. Immediately she knew the gelding was injured. She dismounted and bent to study his near foreleg.

It didn’t seem to be broken, but Kelpie’s limp told Cat that his fetlock had suffered some damage. He wouldn’t be carrying a rider anytime soon. The only thing Cat could do was lead him home as slowly as possible and hope she didn’t get lost in the dark.

Night fell with surprising swiftness. Cat buttoned her coat against an unexpected chill. Kelpie snorted and bobbed his head.

“I’m sorry, boy,” she murmured. “I should have taken Turk’s advice.” She paused to let Kelpie rest. “It isn’t his fault that I’ve had my fill of the male sex.”

Kelpie lifted his head, ears pricked as if he’d heard a sound that had escaped Cat’s ears.

“You’ll tell me I was stupid to trust him, that I should have seen it coming. All the signs were there.” She clenched her fists. “He used me, and then when he got what he wanted…”

Kelpie stretched his neck and nickered. Cat cocked her head, listening. The earth vibrated under her feet. A low rumble beat the air. A blast of wind, warmed by the heat of a dozen bodies, swept over Cat an instant before the horses leapt out of the darkness.

They were every color men had named: buckskin and Appaloosa, chestnut and bay, pinto and sorrel, white and gray. Their eyes glittered with starlight; their hooves flashed like dark jewels. Cat’s heart surged into her throat. She clung to Kelpie’s reins and closed her eyes. The herd rushed on, implacable, parting at the last moment to flow around woman and horse in a swift and savage tide.