Native Wolf (9 page)

She’d just reached the valley floor when she was suddenly hauled up by the scruff of her neck like a stray kitten. She gasped, flailing against her captor, hoping to twist free. But all her squirming didn’t seem to affect his grip in the least.

Forgetting her promise, she sucked in a breath to yell for help, in case some stray miner was in hearing distance. But he must have anticipated that, for he quickly shifted her in his arms and buried her face against his chest, muffling her cry.

To her alarm, she got a mouthful of bare flesh. She sputtered and beat at his restraining arms, horrified to be in such a shocking position. But it did no good. Smothered against his body, her shrieks of outrage came out as barely audible squeals. And the louder she tried to scream, the tighter he clutched her.

Realizing he wouldn’t let her go until she stopped screaming, she forced herself to cease. But that made her even more aware of their impropriety.

Never had she been in such intimate contact with a man. Where her mouth pressed against his taut muscle, his skin was distressingly warm and real. As he continued to confine her there, she found to her horror that she could feel his chest rising and falling with each deep breath. Her own rapid breathing moistened his skin, and she could smell…and taste…the faint salt of his sweat. It was…mortifying.

Just about the time she was sure she could endure no more, he finally spoke. His voice resonated in his chest and sounded almost as ragged as she felt. “Are you going to be quiet now?”

She nodded, eager to be out of his embrace.

“You promise?”

She nodded once more.

Slowly, tentatively, he loosened his grip on her, though he kept one hand bunched in the shirt at the back of her neck. She pulled back, and her lips released from his chest—almost, to her humiliation, like a kiss.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get yourself killed,” he scolded in a harsh whisper. “Don’t run off again.”

She might have promised not to make noise, but she hadn’t promised not to fight him. She renewed her struggles, pounding at his chest and kicking at his legs. She might as well have been battling a bull. The half-breed only grunted and hoisted her up again, leaving her swinging at empty air.

He muttered something in his own tongue and then hefted her across his shoulder, holding her there by gripping her backside in a most indecent manner. She would have fought her way free, but just then he began trudging back up the steep rise, and she didn’t dare upset his balance for fear of sending them both down the mountain.

By the time they finally reached the cave, she wasn’t sure if she was more blanched white with fright or flushed red with shame at his cavalier handling.

The minute he set her on her feet, she fled to the back of the cave. She was furious...with him, with the horse, with herself. This had been her big chance to escape, and she’d failed. Worse, she’d been subjected to unspeakable humiliation at her captor’s hands.

Seething with anger, she wrenched his shirt from her shoulders, spitting a curse under her breath with each button she unfastened. She was completely flustered and disgusted by the brazen savage, and she didn't want anything to do with him. She didn’t care if she froze half to death—she never wanted to see...or, God forbid, touch...the half-naked half-breed again.

She wadded up the shirt and tossed it at him. He caught it in one hand. Then she crouched in the dark, watching his massive silhouette as he crossed the passageway, and waited for him to put the shirt on. To her consternation, he didn’t.

She wondered what he’d do to her. Would he punish her for losing the horse? Would he tie her up so she couldn’t flee? Would he subject her to some new degradation?

In the end, he did nothing. He didn’t even give her a tongue-lashing. All he did was tuck the wadded shirt beneath his head and stretch out at the mouth of the cave, where she’d have to climb over him to escape.

She rocked back onto her bottom and hugged her knees, thoroughly miserable. Curse it all, she couldn’t even escape properly. She withdrew the soggy dime novel from her camisole again and plopped it down beside her, glaring at the heroine on the cover. Claire was no intrepid Maude Burland—that was certain. Her books made it sound so easy to outwit villains. Indeed, Claire was beginning to question the accuracy of the stories.

To add insult to injury, within moments she heard her abductor drawing in the deep, untroubled breaths of slumber, as comfortable on the hard stone as she was in her feather bed at home and as sure of her captivity as a cat with a mouse trapped under its paw.

She dropped her chin onto her knees and scowled at the cave floor. Gradually, as the minutes ticked by, her anger began to diminish. But soon other feelings crept in to replace the anger—all-too-familiar feelings of defeat and disappointment.

Could she do nothing right? Sometimes she felt like a complete failure. She'd never been able to please her father, and now even
she
was disappointed in herself.

Why wasn't she as brave and capable as the characters in her books? Why wasn't she fearless, flawless, and tough as beef jerky? Dime novel heroes never lost their horses. They didn't bungle their escapes. They didn’t cry when their mothers fell ill and…

Her throat tightened. Yoema had been the one person Claire could please. Her Indian mother had loved her for who she was. A tear formed in the corner of her eye as painful memories of Yoema surfaced, memories Claire could share with no one—memories of Yoema’s cheerful black eyes and healing hands, of her intriguing stories, her love of animals, her deep respect for nature. And, as on so many nights of late, the memories kept Claire awake.

Her chin began to quiver. Yoema had always sung her to sleep. Without that familiar song, without those nurturing arms and that gentle voice, sleep lost all its comfort.

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the Indian woman beside her, brushing her hair, the long hair that Claire had cut off as abruptly as the old woman had been cut from her life. She heard the melody winding around her ears in the darkness.

The tune started softly in Claire’s throat, almost of its own accord, thin and fragile against the heavy night. She mouthed the simple words around the lump of sorrow thickening her voice.

"Unno winno, unno winno, unno winno."

Though the song saddened her and a single hot tear made its way down her cheek, she continued to sing...unaware that the half-breed had awakened.

Chase felt a prickling sensation, like a spider creeping across his flesh, as the faint song pierced the black night and his memory. It was a Konkow song, one his father had sung to him when he was a boy. The voice was weak, broken by soft sobs, but he still recognized the tune and the murmur of the words.

As the melody continued, echoing eerily against the cave walls, the breath caught suddenly in his chest. What if it came from a
chindin
, a ghost, using the white woman’s voice to speak to him in a tongue he understood? Could his grandmother’s spirit be calling to him through the woman?

With nerves stretched as taut as a curing hide, he twisted toward the girl and snarled, “Hush!”

She gasped. He’d startled her. But at least the haunting music faded from the cave.

"Why do you sing that song?” he hissed, his voice harsh with alarm.

She sniffled. “Leave me alone.”

He jumped to his feet and stalked toward her. He heard her scuttle back, but there was only rock wall behind her. He lunged forward in the darkness, grabbing for whatever he could reach. She shrieked, but his own fear made him insensitive to hers. He wadded the front of her camisole in his fist, yanking her toward him.

"How do you know that song?" he demanded. Unlike his flippant brother, Chase believed in the spirits. He’d received visions all his life, and he knew their power. The white woman couldn’t possibly know the song she sang. It must have come through her from the world beyond.

The girl shivered in his grasp, like a captured fledgling. "M-my mother sang it."

He ground his teeth. "You’re lying."

"No." He felt her fluttering breath upon his face.

"That’s not the song of a white woman."

"No. My...my Konkow mother sang it."

He tightened his fist in the fabric, drawing her nose to nose with him. Konkow mother? What kind of fool did she think he was? Claire Parker was no half-breed. Chase should know. Native blood was impossible to hide. This woman had wide green eyes and sun-bright hair, delicate bones and skin the color of a white deer.

He whispered the words into her face. "Konkow mother? You have no Konkow mother."

To his amazement, she didn’t argue with him. Instead, her chin trembled at his accusation, and she began to weep.

Her soft sobs caught at his heart, and his superstitious dread quickly dissolved. Whatever spirits might have lurked in the cave had probably fled at the sound of the woman’s weeping. He should release her and leave her to her tears.

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to let go of her. She might completely collapse if he did. He wondered what troubled her so much. Then he smirked in self-mockery.
Aside
from the fact that she’d been abducted from her home, dragged through the hills, and forced to sleep in a cave with a stranger.

"Why are you crying?" he demanded, wincing as his voice came out harsher than he intended.

His words only inspired a new flood of tears, and he cursed that gift he had for frightening ladies and babies. He loosened his fist in her camisole. But to his amazement, before he could retreat to a safe distance, she seized his hand between her two, clinging to him as if he were a bark canoe in a raging river.

"I did have a mother," she insisted with a sob. "I did. I had a Konkow mother. She taught me that song." She held fast to his hand now, squeezing it, her words rushing out like a babbling spring that must hurry over the rocks before it’s swallowed up. "She sang the song to me every night. It was a song of her tribe. She—”

He snatched his hand back with a curse. He saw clearly now. The woman was trying to trick him. She hoped to gain his confidence, to convince him that she wasn’t a white woman, not the enemy, not the daughter of Samuel Parker, but a daughter of his father’s people, the Konkow.

He shook his head. "You’re as white as your
kilwe
father." She may not know the Hupa word for evil, but she couldn’t mistake the tone of his voice.

"She wasn’t my real mother," she admitted breathlessly. "My real mother died when I was a little girl."

He attempted to ignore her chatter, but she clutched his arms and continued hammering at his thoughts like a woodpecker at an oak trunk.

"But she cared for me like a daughter. She told me stories and sang songs for me. She healed me when I was sick. Yoema was the only—"

He sucked the breath hard between his teeth and knocked her hands free.

Her voice sounded deceptively innocent. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

His heart pounded, and his breath rattled in the deathly still of the cave. She knew his grandmother by name. Was it possible? Had his grandmother been the woman’s personal slave?

“Don’t speak that name,” he muttered.

"Yoema? But she—"

He lunged forward, grabbing what he found of her person to shake her. "Do not speak my grandmother’s name!"

She gasped. After a moment of breathless silence, she murmured, “Your grandmother?"

Chase could feel the woman’s rapid pulse under his fingers, for he’d caught her by the throat.

"But how can that..." Her unfinished sentence hung between them as tight and deadly as a drawn bow. Then he felt her swallow beneath his thumb. "Oh.
Oh.
If she’s your..." She let out her breath. "Then you're... You must be... You're one of the...the Two-Sons."

She said it just like that, Two-Sons, as if it were one word, under her breath, an unutterable curse, just the way his Konkow grandmother would have spoken it.

To the Konkow people, it
was
a curse. It was the reason his parents had left their village to journey north to Hupa. Twins were an anomaly among the Konkows, unnatural and dangerous. Though his parents never spoke of it, Drew and he knew what they were. They also knew they had cheated death. If they hadn’t been carried away to Hupa as infants, either one or both of them would have been killed. Such was the Konkow way.

And because the boys were essentially dead to her, their grandmother would never have learned their names.

But apparently she hadn’t forgotten them. She’d spoken of the Two-Sons to this white woman. Despite their exile, she’d held her grandsons in her memory. The thought touched his heart, even as it widened the crack of sorrow there.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” the woman murmured. “You
are
one of the Two-Sons.”

He didn’t answer.

“The twins who had a Konkow father and a white mother,” she said.

He didn’t answer.

“Who traveled far away to the north.”

She obviously knew all about him. There was no point in denying it.

He grunted in confirmation.

She nodded. “Then there's something I've waited a long while to ask you.” She pried his hand from her neck. “Where the
hell
have you been?”